Sarin Marchetti - Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James-Palgrave Macmillan (2015)

Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James
Ethics and Philosophical

Critique in William James
Sarin Marchetti
University College Dublin, Ireland
© Sarin Marchetti 2015
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First published 2015 by
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Marchetti, Sarin, 1983–
Ethics and philosophical critique in William James / Sarin Marchetti,
University College Dublin, Ireland.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978–1–137–54177–2
1. James, William, 1842–1910. 2. Ethics. I. Title.
B945.J24M33 2015
170.92—dc23 2015015616
The result of twenty-four hundred years of philosophical
dialogue is, among other things, to develop senses for words
that are either much more restricted, or much richer, than those
of common usage.
– Richard Rorty, “The Philosopher as Expert”
Contents
Acknowledgments viii
Introduction: William James, the Moral Philosopher 1
1 Pragmatism, Therapy, and the Moral Life 9
2 Questioning Moral Theory and the Shape of Ethics 48
3 The Life of the Mind and the Practices of the Self 117
4 Truth, Experience, and the World Re-Enchanted 159
5 Ethical Conduct and Political Activity 214
Conclusion: The Seeds of a Revolution in Moral Philosophy 248
Notes 265
Bibliography 276
Index 289
vii
Acknowledgments
The naïve picture of academics as solitary figures silently composing

their books while secluded in their offices and workrooms dominated
my imagination as a reader and my way of reading for quite some time,
eventually turning into a sheer falsity – both theoretically and practi-
cally – when I engaged in writing one myself. This book is in fact the
result of intimate strivings and grappling with ethics and metaphi-
losophy as well as of the most unexpected encounters and disparate
exchanges with those who variously instigated those efforts in the first
place and assisted me in their critical handling. The struggle with the
subtle complexity of such issues took on the form of a series of private
monologues and boisterous conversations with my peers on the diffi-
culty of finding one’s philosophical voice to properly address them. My
hope is that each page of this work will tell the story of such situated
and extensive efforts.
To discipline myself to think took me years of attention, adjustments,
and conversions of various kinds. I have now just started to learn that
to be a writer takes even greater concentration, composure, and self-
government: countless nights and days sat at my desk made me realize
that a book requires one to endure and outlive an extended intellec-
tual commitment, as well as close self-examination. However, this
activity would have been an arid experiment in self-discipline if not for
the enrichment that my engagement with some valuable individuals
brought to it and, in its turn, was shaped by it. I would not, in fact,
have even begun to think that I might have something to say if not for
the methodical and sometimes painstaking care and encouragement of
some remarkable persons I have been involved with and of the organiza-
tions I took part in. Wishing to be judged by the outcomes spurred by
these openings and provocations alone, I cannot but be thankful for the
path covered in their tentative achievement, which gave sense to the
whole journey.
A journey begun in the classes of Eugenio Lecaldano and Tito Magri at
Sapienza Università di Roma, and continued in those of Akeel Bilgrami
at Columbia University and Dick Bernstein at The New School for Social
Research. One of the driving forces of the past ten years of my philo-
sophical thinking has been my desire to demonstrate that I treasured
their teachings and that it was worth spending some time arguing with
viii
Acknowledgments ix
me about their work and mine. I am also much obliged to Rosa Calcaterra
and Giancarlo Marchetti, who I came to encounter only at a later stage
of this path, for their insightful criticism of my most recent work and a
number of collaborations.
Piergiorgio Donatelli, my Doktorvater, played a crucial role in my phil-
osophical formation and coming to maturity, a project of self-cultiva-
tion still ongoing. I simply cannot think of the several critical moments,
both joyful and grim, of my thinking and writing without his presence
instructing and engaging me, for which I am deeply grateful. Maria
Baghramian, my postdoctoral mentor, provided me with her sharp
insights, steady directions, and tireless support at a crucial crossroad of
my life and career. Her strength is my confidence, and her dedication
my guide.
I had the good fortune to share my college years, which extended
much beyond seminar rooms and library stacks, with some exquisite
friends. I need to thank Farid Al Aflak for bygone but eternally returning
conversations in Trastevere on hope, despair, and the possibility of
redemption; Guido Baggio for discussing literature, films, and the fine
art of self-deception; and Marco Nani for savvy exchanges on intellec-
tual history, the allure of books, and the contingency of authorship.
Michele Spanò and Alessio Vaccari have been in different ways ongoing
sources of challenge and inspiration, besides providers of confidence
and comfort. The encounter with Stefano Di Brisco has been a delightful
and enriching event, and our bond survives all kinds of practical adver-
sities. I am wholeheartedly thankful to Matteo Falomi for sharing his
unique talent with me and for a much beloved friendship. I have the
good fortune to keep learning from him about life and philosophy, and
about how beautiful and rewarding comradeship can be.
To my Team Americana I owe the invaluable gift of their partnership
in a wonderful intellectual adventure, from which I have learned a lot
about my needs and about those of an academic life. Heartfelt thanks
to Áine Mahon and Fergal McHugh for brisk conversations, rewarding
collaborations, and good laughs. The Pragma group, an impressive
ensemble of keen and engaged pragmatists, represented a source of
constant stimulus and amusement. I owe much to its gifted members,
and in particular to Anna Boncompagni, Roberto Frega, and Roberto
Gronda for their fine work and the enjoyable shared activities. I am
most thankful to Alan Rosenberg for a wonderful experiment in philo-
sophical friendship, and for his sincere Beckettian encouragement “to
go on.” His wisdom is only matched by his devotedness to the exam-
ined life.
x Acknowledgments
I have also accumulated a wealth of debts during many enlightening

conferences, gripping seminars, congenial workshops, and enriching
research trips across three continents, where I had the great fortune to
meet and learn from some most admired thinkers. Francesca Bordogna,
Jim Conant, Alice Crary, Paul Croce, Arnold Davidson, Ramón Del
Castillo, Cora Diamond, Alexis Dianda, Richard Gale, Judith Green, Logi
Gunnarsson, Sandra Laugier, John McDowell, Stephane Madelrieux,
Cheryl Misak, Naoko Saito, Jim O’Shea, and Sami Pihlström, all played a
great role in shaping and challenging my views. I am thankful to all and
each of them for time spent discussing what I variously found compel-
ling, perplexing, and even deceiving about James, ethics, and philo-
sophical critique.
A very special thanks goes to Russell Goodman, who since our first
encounter a half dozen years ago relentlessly inspired and enlightened my
work. He is such a good philosopher because, borrowing Wittgenstein’s
memorable remark on James, he is a real human being. A major spur for
putting the book together came from Colin Koopman, who generously
gave me the opportunity to present its overall blueprint in a congenial
book-in-progress session he organized within the 2012 Summer Institute
in American Philosophy. Discussing the book with him and wandering
along the West Coast have been genuinely rewarding experiences that
did very good to me at a critical stage of its elaboration.
A different kind of acknowledgment, if only because it cannot be
appreciated anymore, goes to Sergio Franzese, with whom I discussed
several aspects of this work. It will be my lasting regret that I arrived too
late to fully elaborate my own reading of James, which he was so eager
to discuss despite his troubled health. I’m sorry Sergio.
Brendan George, my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, showed quick faith
and contagious enthusiasm for the project. I am indebted to him and to
his editorial team – and especially to Esme Chapman – for following the
book with all the care it needed through its various phases. To the many
colleagues and friends who heroically took pains to read the manuscript
in its various shapes and cuts I owe gratitude for the many punctual
remarks, as well as extensive annotations, that greatly helped me to
clarify what I wanted to say and how to say it best. All such penetrating
comments prompted me to overcome the many shortcomings infesting
the earlier versions, challenging me to be a better writer and thinker.
I am particularly thankful to Colin Koopman, Charlene Seigfried, and
two anonymous reviewers from Palgrave Macmillan for their extensive
comments on the penultimate version of the manuscript, which has
greatly benefited from them and is now a much better work. All the
Acknowledgments xi
proverbial faults that survived such multiple and extended reviews are
my intellectual property alone.
Lastly, Carlo, Gabriella, and Schedar encouraged without hesitation
my resolution to break with the family tradition in theoretical physics. I
thank them for gracefully sustaining my most delicate practical and moral
needs, and because they showed me a way of living which I have learned
to love. This book is, among other things, what kept me from spending
more time together, which I know I’ll be regretting and already do.
In partial compensation for the way too many privations that a philo-
sophical life, despite its best promises, imposes on the ordinary one, I
dedicate this work to Lavinia. I hope that the extended delays and last-
minute cancellations, the brusque changes of mind and mood, and a
number of distances and disruptions imposed on you despite my best
efforts made us, in the end, stronger. You know how important all this
is to me. You know how important you are to me.
This book has been written while benefiting from a postdoctoral fellow-
ship from Sapienza University of Rome (2011–12), my Alma mater, and
a postdoctoral research assistantship from University College, Dublin
(2012–13), my current institution. I am grateful to Piergiorgio Donatelli
and Maria Baghramian for having granted me those two vital years of
research life, which made this book possible and shaped its author in
many subtle and complex ways. Although in a reworked form, and in
some cases in a different language, material from the book has been
published as “William James on Truth and Invention in Morality,”
European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy, vol. 2, no. II,
2010; “James, l’etica e la teoria morale,” in Pragmata: Per una ricostruzione
storiografica dei pragmatismi, 2012; “James e l’etica: psicologia e verità,”
in Pragmatismi: Le origini della modernità, 2012; and “Unfamiliar Habits:
James on the Ethics and Politics of Self-Experimentation,” William James
Studies, Vol. 11, 2015.
University College, Dublin
August 2014
Introduction: William James, the
Moral Philosopher
Working on and with James means taking pluralism seriously: that is,
it means thinking hard about what it means to be a pluralist as well
as trying to be one. Yet pluralism should not be mistaken for intellec-
tual laxity, as one’s selective take on reality or interested approach to
an author can and should be defended with as many reasons and argu-
ments as one is capable of, and then left to others to be challenged and
eventually transformed in an ongoing renegotiation whose outcomes
cannot be easily anticipated. We are pluralists precisely because we care
about what is the case and what is not, with such judgments as always
made from a certain perspective, because of certain concerns, and for
determinate goals. Saying that anything might be equally true or false
as in the absence of any secure, external foundation “anything goes”, is
not pluralism, but rather reflective indulgence. For matters of concern
here, this means that in arguing for a certain philosophical view or inter-
pretation one is expressing a commitment which is as strong and valid
as the readiness to defend and argue for them, while claiming that the
fact that no real evaluation is possible means de facto subscribing to yet
another form of absolutism or parochialism – this time about the impos-
sibility of intellectual progress altogether. Pluralism so understood lies at
the heart of pragmatic humanism and its belief in conversational criteria
and norms as the only available grounds for one’s readings, as well as for
the positive articulation of one’s own thoughts in conduct.
William James is a thinker who invites this kind of approach. Richard
Gale said it best when he wrote that “any interpretation of James that
purports to be the correct one thereby shows itself not to be ... for James
sought a maximally rich and suggestive philosophy, one in which
everyone could see themselves reflected (Gale 2005: ix).” However, if
what I have just said about pluralism and its normative stakes has some
1
2 Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James
grounding, then there are better and worse reflections on James. In this
respect, I follow Charlene Seigfried, who writes that “despite the reali-
zation that there are an infinite number of ways to reconstruct James’s
writings, not all ways are equally helpful, illuminative, or suggestive
for further research (Seigfried 1990: 393).” The author portrayed in the
following pages is thus a William James, and yet one that I consider to
be at once historically-biographically sound and extremely relevant to
our own moral and philosophical investigations, understood as moments
of cultural criticism. The reconstruction of James offered in this work, at
times very assertive, should in fact be read as the expression of exigen-
cies internal to my own ethical and philosophical thinking: namely, the
formulation of a non-foundational but at a the same time critical concep-
tion of ethical and philosophical reflection – one which I find brilliantly
articulated in James’s oeuvre and which in my next project I shall relate
to those of other kindred spirits and fellow travelers.
In this work I shall thus advance a functionalist reading of James as a
moral philosopher, in which I single out some insights and themes that
I consider relevant for the investigation of the complexities of the moral
life, showing their emergence and footing in his writings. Furthermore, I
shall argue that the distinctive cipher of James’s ethical work can be best
appreciated when viewed against the background of his overall radical
approach to philosophical activity. One of the central claims of this work
shall in fact be that James voiced with surprising lucidity a formidable
challenge to a set of assumptions (still) governing our ordinary and
intellectual practices alike. This operation disclosed a novel reflective
framework grounded in an original metaphilosophy and transformative
method. In particular, I am interested in surveying how this distinctive
approach and conceptual sensibility informed James’s views on, and his
work in, ethics. Rather than defending yet another position among or
against those available on the intellectual market and discussed with
various degrees of self-criticism in academic circles, James attempted –
and, in the light of what happened after him, commenced – a revolution
in moral thought which could not but proceed from a radical rethinking
of what philosophical critique as a whole might be and do for those
practicing it, as well as for those relying on it in various degrees.
One way of illustrating this paradigmatic shift and re-orientation of
intellectual aims is by means of comparison with the work of another
master of American modernism. In his canvas Office in a Small City
(1953)1 Edward Hopper painted an ordinary scene of an unspecified
employee sat at his desk, slightly reclined on his chair and looking
through the window at the happenings of the city at the foot of his
office. Although we can only glimpse the upper windows and terrace
of a residential building facing the office, we can well picture the
crowded street life below as a pathway of chaotic exchanges and over-
lapping stories. His expression is very hard to decipher, but on a closer
inspection – one which motivated several compulsive visits to the
Metropolitan Museum of Art – I read in it a mixture of puzzlement
(where the asymmetrical position of his arms seem to corroborate this
sense of uncertainty), daydreaming (suggested by the slight inclination
of the chair and stillness of his posture), sadness (about what he is doing
in the office, and with his life), and worry (perhaps caused by the very
looking at the reality outside as contrasted with the space, furniture,
and meaning of the room surrounding him). The figure likely shares
the office with someone (as an empty chair visible in the same position
on his left and another desk behind him seem to indicate) and yet he
is alone in this scene, perhaps in an instant of occasional solitariness
or perhaps systematic solitude. It is important to recognize that we are
looking at him (and at the wider scene of him looking and reacting at
the world through his office window) through a window ourselves: we
can see part of the world from his point of view but we also have direct
access to it. There is also a part of the outside world that we can’t see
at all because of the office walls, and that is no small part of the entire
canvas – roughly one fourth. Finally, we can see (only through the series
of windows) another big office building in the background overlooking
the city itself: although, very tellingly, lacking any visible window.
Another detail which I find extremely meaningful is that Hopper adds
to the forefront office the pattern of what seems to be either a shop or
a residential building façade (bottom right), thus suggesting that the
office itself could be – or has been – much more intertwined with the
life of the city than we might at first have thought by looking at the
contrast of the scene. Finally, the natural light from the outside illu-
minates the office at an interesting angle, thus creating another stark
contrast: the light hits the figure without however pervading the whole
room. We are left with the sense that the light might come to illumi-
nate the whole office in a progress of intensity, or alternatively will
fail to do so as it is on the verge of fading away. Thus, we may see the
subject awakened or eclipsed by the light.
This masterpiece by Hopper is part of a fortunate series of scenes of
the American life on which much has been written.2 The reason I find
this canvas especially gripping and congenial to the point I shall make
in what follows is that it best portrays the very condition of the moral
philosopher as I see James depicting her, which will be the very focus of
this work. James is (and we are) looking at a moral philosopher through

the window of her intellectual workroom. The philosopher is sitting at
her desk reflecting and writing about ethics while looking at the ordinary
world, eventually uncomfortable and puzzled about what she is doing,
how she is doing it, and why. She seems to be working partially secluded
from the moral reality she is (or should be) addressing, with other big
intellectual edifices in view, themselves overlooking the ordinary life
and world outside – although, at least in the case at hand, blindly, as
the structures seem to lack any external opening. Furthermore, this
figure works alone, although such isolation might be only momentary
rather than habitual – but, any way, only disrupted by exchanges with
others in a similar situation or sharing the same environment. The
moral philosopher seems to be theorizing about something with which
she has little engagement (as suggested by the sharp contrast between
the inner and the outer spaces), perhaps because she is scared of, or
baffled by the object of her attention, or rather because this very condi-
tion is somewhat imposed on her by dynamics internal to the intellec-
tual game she is supposedly playing, and whose validity she might be
starting to question. There are certain areas that are removed altogether
from our sight because of the very presence of the edifices, and others
to which we have direct access. Obviously, the interesting areas are the
ones which we can only see through what the philosopher sees. So, one
can read the scene depicted in Hopper’s canvas, and in James’s texts, as
one of problematization of such triangulation – a scene greatly enriched
by the apparently unimportant detail that such buildings and the intel-
lectual practices there performed might be (or have been) a constitutive
part of the reality they overlook from the height of their position (as the
telling texture on the building visible on the bottom right of the canvas
seems to suggest).
Thus, we might read hope in this scene, if we interpret this exact
moment as one of examination and questioning about a certain
entrenched habit and lifestyle (with the sun of ordinary life eventually
enlightening the subject), but also desperation about the very possibility
outcome of such radical self-criticism and denunciation, if instead we
understand the subject as acquiescent about her position and situation
(and thus her figure slowly fading into darkness). Either way, what my
Hopperian James is depicting is a scene of instruction which it is our
duty as engaged practitioners and as ordinary beings to ponder. What is
very important for me to stress is that in the office there is a lot going
on: namely, a complex life with a certain activity to eventually put in
question and reflect upon, which is in fact our task to acknowledge and
eventually transform from the within of its exercise. James and Hopper,
the way I read them, are not criticizing a certain practice per se, but are
rather pointing to its complexity, as well as hinting at the genealogy of
its emergence and justification in order for us to reflect on the various
ways in which we inhabit it and might perform it otherwise.
My reading of James’s work in ethics shall thus revolve around the
metaphilosophical concerns about the very nature and point of philo-
sophical investigation as the very soil in which his moral work bloomed.
While it is surely true that we might well spot other themes and threads
in his moral thought and writings, in this work I am concerned in high-
lighting the particular relationships between moral reflection and the
moral life as the most interesting feature of James’s critical work in –
and on – ethics. It will be my contention that this aspect is in fact the
centerpiece and most interesting feature of his moral thought; over-
looking it has represented a major impoverishment in the scholarship
on James and pragmatism, as well as in its use in the contemporary
ethical debate.
There are many fine studies that have investigated the cultural milieu
and historical contingencies surrounding James’s moral thought (and,
more in general, his pragmatism) as the key to grasp the center of his
views.3 Yet, in this text I shall study James’s work from the inside, as one
might say, rather than looking at its context – despite the unmistak-
able importance of the latter for understanding the former. That is, I
shall focus on James’s work in order to assess its concerns, structure, and
outcomes as they are explored in his writings and personal correspond-
ence, leaving somewhat in the background the wider circumstances –
cultural and historical – which shape the material conditions of his
flights of thought.
Given this proviso, in my reconstruction I have been mindful of the
other (kind of) literature in the conviction that my interpretation of
James’s work in moral philosophy is consistent with his narrative as first
and foremost an engaged intellectual of his age: that is, not only as a
witness of its time but rather, and foremost, as one of its most active
reformers. It will be my contention that James was addressing the philo-
sophical and cultural climate of his time (thus the importance of the
context of his work), and yet striving to figure out how to set up a way
of thinking and living which he thought worth experimenting with,
despite the particular configuration in which individuals would have
tried to put it to work. Like Hopper, who painted an extremely situ-
ated regional scene and yet was striving to illuminate a very general
dynamic of the human condition, of which Hopper’s scene was but one
exemplification, James addressed a particular cultural landscape while

pointing to a model of critical inquiry and personal flourishing general
enough to resonate in contemporary debates and remain available to
us – although with all the necessary historical qualifications and envi-
ronmental adjustments.
Interestingly enough, the rich and momentous lesson that James
taught us informs in deep ways the understanding and practice of ethics
of an important – although heterodox – portion of our philosophical
culture, without at the same time the recognition and credit of this deep
legacy. One of the goals and aspirations of this work is that of enriching
such consciousness (or, dependently on the interlocutor, of overcoming
such oblivion), and possibly foster new dialogues and venues of cross-
fertilization among different authors, traditions, and styles, both appar-
ently distant and suspiciously close. Whether this movement would
lead to the dissolution of philosophy and ethics as we know them or
rather to their radical reconsideration is not easy to tell. And yet I am
convinced that such reflective work might endow and enrich us with
more tools to approach such seminal questionings overshadowing our
best historical inquiries and our original ethical investigations alike.
Plan of the book
In Chapter 1 I frame James’s reconsideration of ethics in the wider context

of his pragmatic understanding of philosophical activity, showing how
overlooking this metaphilosophical dimension of his work impedes a
proper appreciation of its most distinctive feature. I thus briefly survey
the various strategies of accounting for James’s ethics, and offer a first
sketch of my revisionist reading, hinged on the prioritization of the
methodological cipher of his pragmatism and understood as a piece of
therapeutic critique, drawing a series of consequences for the way James
invites us to reconsider the very role and task of a reflective inquiry on
the moral life.
In Chapter 2 I begin to unfold my argument about the anti-theoretical
register informing James’s moral philosophy by offering a novel inter-
pretation of “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” (henceforth
“Moral Philosopher”). According to this reading, “Moral Philosopher”
should be read as an invitation to challenge our expectations about
what moral philosophy (and thus us as moral philosophers) might do to
best address the moral life. In full accordance with his general metaph-
ilosophical positions, James would not advance a moral theory or build
a morality system, but rather he presents us different pictures of ethics
with which he encourage us to confront and experiment with, chal-

lenging in this way both our intellectual sensibility and our ordinary
responses to them. This theme informs, in different degrees, his entire
philosophical production, and in particular his moral writings, repre-
senting the most crystalline outcome of his conception of the philo-
sophical activity, whose point is the clarification, and not the foundation
of our ordinary practices.
Chapter 3 is mostly dedicated to The Principles of Psychology, which I
claim to be a goldmine of moral considerations, emphasizing the ethical
dimension of this text. I locate such moral presence in the articula-
tion of a pragmatic anthropology according to which human beings
are makers and not mere spectators of their own self-fashioning. James
explores in great detail the various ways in which individuals can shape
the various aspects of their subjectivity, and their relevance to ethics. In
some central chapters of PP James depicts the peculiar uses we can make
of our psychological makeup and the practices and technique of self-cul-
tivation through which we constitute ourselves. This shift of emphasis
from what human beings either are or should be to what they might make
of themselves lies at the heart of this pragmatic re-interpretation of the
classical model of the care of the self as the proper object of ethics.
In Chapter 4 I individuate and discuss the moral salience of two central
texts of James’s maturity: Pragmatism and The Meaning of Truth. In partic-
ular, I explore the relevance of the pragmatic conception of truth as an
inventive and evaluative attitude there articulated for the understanding
of those moral essays such as “On a certain Blindness in Human Beings”
and “What Makes a Life Significant,” where James explores the moral
shortcomings in which we incur when we endorse a representationalist
(as against an agential) picture of truth. This picture in fact blinds us to
appreciating large provinces of moral salience that we encounter in, and
create through, our ordinary practices of world-making, thus obscuring
the working on the self at play in their unfolding. In this context moral
reflection aims at surveying and monitoring those personal adjustments
and workings necessary for attaining such enriched conception of expe-
riencing in which the truths we live by are expressive of our point of
view on things, and in which the appreciation of values is portrayed
as dependent on the capacity to assume an engaged stance toward the
world.
Chapter 5 argues that moral philosophy, in its most practical func-
tion, should take the form of the critical analysis of the various forms of
practical engagement with oneself and with the world, of the kind James
discusses in “The Energies of Men”, “Great Men and their Environment”
and “The Importance of Individuals.” In these works James sketches a

critical reflection on, and a problematization of, our practices of experi-
ence (that is, of our doing and undoing of experience), which invites a
distinctively moral and political form of engagement with ourselves and
with the world, of a kind he addresses in “The Moral Equivalent of War”
and in “The Powers of Men.” These works form what might be called
James’s practical ethics, which lives on in the work of some of his most
attentive readers, who built on it and which it is our burden to critically
revise and hopefully expand.
This defense of the nature, methods, and stakes of moral philosophy
represents a valuable alternative to the legalistic (that is, prescriptive
and action-guiding) understanding and practice of ethics currently
dominating moral philosophy. The interest for James’s approach should
thus not to be confined to a sheer matter of pragmatist scholarship. In
the conclusion I reprise the main points of my heterodox reconstruction
of James’s moral thought and gesture at one possible legacy of this novel
approach to ethics. Investigating such legacy represents a first step to set
the ground for a counter-narrative of the place and importance of prag-
matism in twentieth century moral philosophy. James’s work as a moral
philosopher, I argue, is still compelling and forceful, and its impact on
contemporary ethical debate is yet to be fully appreciated.
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 anal-
ysis 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
9
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 litera-
ture 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 prob-
lematic 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 distinc-
tive 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.
Pragmatism, Therapy, and the Moral Life 11
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 diffi-
culty which will introduce the reader to the journey that the present
book shall cover. There is in fact a formidable problem of how to appre-
ciate the compelling issues James was struggling with in a cultural
context and sensibility that has changed radically. This difficulty char-
acterizes 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 litera-
ture 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 prob-

lems, 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 disre-
gard 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, intellectu-
ally 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 momen-
tary 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 consti-
tution of our current philosophical practice and mindset. Both tradi-
tions 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 under-
standing James thus means taking issues first and foremost with prag-
matism: 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 tradi-
tion – 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 prag-
matist 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 concep-
tual stone, and the perplexities of the radical historicist with her system-
atic 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 prob-
lems 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 recon-
struction 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 alterna-
tive 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 considera-
tions on the central speculative questions under a integrated philosoph-
ical 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 philosoph-
ical strategies to unmask such assumptions and expectations, and thus
instruct our approaches to some vital intellectual and ordinary difficul-
ties. 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 harmo-
nize the different general accounts just sketched with the diverse reac-
tions 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 for a series of subtler distinctions. Let me
sketch a possible picture of this situation that might be helpful to give a

glimpse of its complexity.
In the many accounts of James’s moral thought we can isolate two
very general opposite attitudes. Some interpreters – the “inconclusiv-
ists” – have fervidly refuted the idea of an articulated defense of a moral
position detectable in his writings, while some others – the “systema-
tizers” – have attempted its reconstruction. While the inconclusivists
tried to show, in various ways and with different aims, either the theo-
retical weakness or the sporadicity and inconsistency of James’s philo-
sophical reflection on ethics, the systematizers have argued in favor of
its theoretical solidity and organic articulation.
The inconclusivists divided themselves between those who dismissed
his moral considerations as vague or confused – the “hardcore incon-
clusivists” – and those who underlined the intentional unsystematic
character of his moral thought – the “mild inconclusivists.” The system-
atizers too gave different and diverging expositions. The latter offered in
fact diverse reconstructive accounts of James’s moral philosophy, which
however can be brought into three general families: those – the “theo-
rists” – who recognized the 1891 essay “Moral Philosopher” as the key
text of his moral thought, in which James would have laid down the
theoretical lineaments of his moral theory, widely considered it as an
eclectic version of consequentialism, even if some authors detected in
it shades of deontologism – further elaborated in his other moral writ-
ings; those – the “moralists” – who, by downsizing the importance of
“Moral Philosopher”, and pointing occasionally to its inadequacies and
shortcomings, have concentrated their attention instead on such essays
as “The Energies of Men” and “Great Men and their Environment,” in
which James is deemed to have defended a version of moral individu-
alism and heroism resistant to any theorization; a latter group of inter-
preters – the “synthesizers”– instead read James’s ethics in the light of the
broader and more articulated metaphysical and religious considerations
articulated in “The Will to Believe,” in Varieties of Religious Experience,
and in A Pluralistic Universe.
In the picture just sketched, while the inconclusivists share a suspi-
cion about the heterogeneity, and at least partial incompatibility, of
the diverse parts of James’s ethics – of which they resist any harmonic
synthesis – the systematizers diverge precisely in its interpretation. Both
approaches have strengths and weaknesses, but overall they are to me
equally unsatisfactory. Bluntly stated, against the inconclusivists I shall
argue how in James’s writings one can detect an elaborated defense of
a promising moral position, although I disagree with the systematizers
about their various reconstructions of its unity. In particular, in partial

dissent with both the theorists and the moralists I individuate a thread
which ties together the different parts of James’s ethical production in
a coherent whole that is, however, neither a prescriptive ethical theory
nor a normative morality system. However, unlike the synthesizers I
defend a strong thesis on what might be called the situated autonomy of
ethics in respect to other philosophical provinces of discourse, despite
their productive overlapping. With situated autonomy I refer to the
irreducibility of the moral dimension to contiguous ones (e.g. religious,
metaphysical), at pains of losing the specificity of each, as well as losing
sight of the rich dialogues among them.
I shall thus unfold a third way of reading James’s moral philosophy, as
an organic ensemble which coagulates around the idea of an elucidation
and problematization of certain intellectual and ordinary assumptions
informing our moral life, which gets articulated in different directions
and with different emphases in his moral writings, and which draws on
his wider metaphilosophical views. This alternative approach requires
in the first place a change of attitude toward James as a philosopher,
an adjustment in the way we approach his various writings, as well as
in the expectations we have when reading his work as a whole. This
change is of the utmost importance in the moral case, and its sources
can be traced in James’s overall conception of philosophical work as he
depicts it in several key texts. It was in fact James’s point that philos-
ophy, when practiced in a pragmatist mood, would cause us to abandon
certain assumptions about what philosophy might do for us and about
what philosophers should be doing when philosophizing. Challenging,
revising or abandoning certain intellectual and ordinary habits of
thought and conduct is in fact for James the philosopher’s task, and part
of his work in ethics is dedicated precisely to the discussion of the condi-
tions for the achievement of such accomplishments when doing moral
philosophy as well as when immersed in our moral lives.
As every scholar who has engaged with and worked on James knows
only too well, the hardest thing in writing about such a prominent and
exuberant figure is that of selecting a perspective on his philosophy
that, despite its necessary selectiveness, would not sacrifice too many of
its countless aspects and undertones. It is for this reason that I shall be
approaching his moral thought from an angle that I think best conveys
the finesse and complexity of his moral thought, as well as one which
would reflect what I see as its main accomplishment. Far from any claim
of completeness, I will rather offer a key with which to approach his
work and evaluate his distinctive understanding of the nature and scope
of a philosophical account of morality, and thus of the role and work of

the moral philosopher. The different approaches and interpretations of
his work that I shall discuss, and eventually discard, fail in my view to
do justice to this central feature of his thought, which I take to be of the
utmost relevance to the contemporary debate on such themes.
In this chapter I shall indicate the coordinates that according to me
would fix the extremes of such an enterprise, asking of the reader an
imaginative effort to guess its complete outline, here only sketched. I
approach James as neither a moral theorist nor as an insightful moralist –
let alone an inconclusivist ethicist – but rather as a thinker interested in
the critique of the way we portray and profess philosophical ethics. This
is to my mind the most effective way to unfold the complexities of his
work as a moral philosopher. Borrowing James’s term of art, I read in
his work a defense and articulation of an exhortative or hortatory ethics:
according to James, philosophical ethics should drop its foundational
pretences and rather acquire an exhortative tone – that is, it should
help us deal with the difficulties of the moral life often caused by our
own attitudes toward our ordinary practices and their reflective coun-
terparts and desiderata. Ethics practiced in a Jamesian way should thus
be instructive rather than prescriptive, giving us instruments to better
deal with the moral life from within its practice and exercise, rather than
trying to rule it from the outside or above.
In offering such reading, I do not want to hide the tensions animating
the various parts of this project as they figure in his rather variegated
writings. Rather, by investigating James’s texts from an anti-systematic
perspective and stressing the methodological aspect of his work over its
contents, at least some of these tensions will be interpreted as produc-
tive possibilities which James is offering to his readers, and thus, in a
sense, will be re-absorbed. Once more, this line of reading will constitute
an alternative to the many interpretative epicycles that James’s systema-
tizer made to square his views under the umbrella of a single principle or
view, as well as to the dismissal of the various scenarios James presented
us with as sheer contradictions, as suggested by the inconclusivists.
I shall thus proceed by delineating an internal path in James’s moral
thought by making it emerge from the dialectic of his writings, being
attentive at the same time to the many theoretical short-circuits that
our author establishes with other fields of discourse and experience.
In particular, I hope to show how the interpretative key internal to
his moral writings, suggested by James himself in some fundamental
passages of his work, is often overlooked by his readers. This overlooking
would compromise a sound understanding of the philosophical import
of his insights on the nature of moral reflection, and consequently the

very possibility of appreciating the most positive characterization of
ethics available from such an internal perspective.
Let me pause for a moment on this point to clear the ground from
some possible misunderstanding. I think that it is important to stress
such specificity of ethics and of the moral discourse in James because it
is only when we do so that we can fully appreciate the many references
to other (more or less contiguous) fields that he also explored at depth:
most importantly, the metaphysical and the religious. I will thus resist
those reconstructions suggesting the essential unity and overlapping of
such diverse conceptual and experiential fields, for their conflation of
a close dialogue and exchange with their identification. James’s investiga-
tions into such diverse domains, although at times closely related to the
inquiry into the very nature and place of moral reflection in our moral
life on which I shall focus, pertain to different declinations of that prag-
matist approach and attitude that James encourages us to assume in our
diverse reflective incursions.
Although there is in James a strong resistance to disciplinary categories
and departmental thinking,10 still I shall claim that his distinctive mode
of philosophizing took several different shapes and turns with reference
to subject matter, context, and most importantly, strategic intentions of
his inquiry. So, although we find in his work many cross-references to
the various fields of discourse and experience – for example the warning
against certain intellectual temptations and modes of thinking featuring
extensively our reflective and our reflective and ordinary inquiries – still
James was equally attentive to the differences characterizing each field in
its own strategy to cope with such difficulties and shortcomings. In VRE
James claims for example how:
The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its

materials. This is the root of all the absolutisms and one-sided dogma-
tism by which both philosophy and religion have been infested. (VRE:
30, my emphasis)
Other passages might be brought as evidence of the contiguity, but

still specificity, of the various fields – ethical, metaphysical, religious,
etc. – as James understands them. If a mindful reading of James’s ethics
cannot but take into consideration both the holistic character of his
philosophizing, and the open texture of moral concepts and experi-
ences, still I suggest that we follow James in his resistance of the too-
widespread and unfortunate craving for generality, which should be
opposed by a painstaking search for meaningful differences. In this direc-

tion, I think it is thus useful to distinguish a “methodological holism”
from a “subject-matter holism”: the former embodying the appreciation
of James’s methodological consistency and balance across discursive and
experiential fields – that is, his acknowledgment of the essential close-
ness and dialogue among the manifold human spheres of discourse and
practice – while the latter betrays instead an impatience for precision and
discrimination of the differences peculiar to each – that is, for James’s live
sense of the many undertones and variances characterizing each domain
of activity, but also for the different and peculiar ways in which each
individual carves nature at its joints by means of such reflective devices.
Even if interesting and imaginative, attempts to wholly describe our
moral life in terms of either our complex relationships with religious
phenomena (religious ethics), or a metaphysical characterization of
reality (metaphysical ethics), risk perpetuating the mistake, denounced
by James himself on various occasions, of impoverishing the varieties
of human experience by adopting a unique explicative strategy. Such
interpretative lines, by ignoring the specificities of the various fields of
discourse and experience (moral, religious, metaphysical, etc.) animating
such diverse – although often intertwined – truths about ourselves and
our being in the world mortifies their respective expressive possibili-
ties, eroding our ability to cultivate their respective originalities. James
invites us to notice the distances between, as well as the contiguities of,
these diverse ambits of discourse and experience. According to James,
in philosophy we should resist the temptation to generalize: a tempta-
tion which, despite being suggestive as an architectonical skill, would
betray the specificities of the various concepts and attitudes featuring
our reflective and ordinary practices.
There are in fact for James many occasions in which ethics interacts with
religion (e.g. in the account of what James calls over-beliefs, as explored
in VRE) and metaphysics (e.g. in the choosing among different world-
views, as James suggests in “The Dilemma of Determinism”),11 but for the
aspect of James’s thought which I am interested in highlighting in this
work – that is, the nature of moral reflection and its bearing on the moral
life – ethics acquires a certain degree of autonomy, and it is important
that it does so – as I will claim in my reading of the last section of “Moral
Philosopher,” which has been often proffered as the clearest evidence of
James’s alleged reduction of ethics to metaphysics and theology. Besides
the general concerns voiced in the previous paragraph, there would thus
be reasons internal to the understanding of this peculiar moral register
(which I take to be the most promising key to assimilate his work in
moral philosophy and as a moral philosopher) of why ethics, the way

James practiced it, aspires to a certain degree of autonomy – although
not purity, as we shall see – thus refusing subject-matter holism while still
embracing methodological holism. To anticipate what I shall tackle at
proper length starting from next chapter, as against the identification of
ethics with metaphysics, I read James as resisting any ontological founda-
tion of the moral life of whichever kind as well as any derivation of moral
reasoning from metaphysical premises (about the self or the world), with
ethics rather representing a human possibility which is open to us to
explore imaginatively in our practices. On the other hand, against the
superimposition of ethics with religion I vindicate a secularist approach
to moral issues in James, for whom religious beliefs might equally help
or hinder the moral life (dependently on the use which the subject enter-
taining them makes of them) but are not necessarily constitutive of it –
the more so if one reads James, as I encourage to, as depicting religion as
an experiential and experimental category with mobile confines rather
than as a body of fixed doctrines.
From this internal perspective, I will articulate my reconstruction of
James’s ethics along three main lines. These are: the survey of his critique
of a theorization of ethics as depicted in morality systems, the related
defense of an alternative, hortatory conception of moral thought, and
the metaphilosophical rethinking of the very nature of philosophical
activity underlining both ventures. Notwithstanding their intertwine-
ment in James’s writings, I will isolate in turn such aspects of his moral
reflection so as to highlight their respective lineaments and thus indi-
cate their multiple conjunctions and articulations in his writings. Far
from exhausting the richness and polyhedral character of James’s moral
thought, I shall argue that such interpretative lines catch its constitutive
aspects, vindicating in this way a precise theoretical line informing the
writings James confronts us with.
An alternative approach: hortatory ethics
As I have begun to argue, the present work offers an original reconstruc-

tion of James’s seminal contribution to ethics that challenges the opposite
but equally unsatisfying claims of systematization and inconclusiveness –
two ethical poles which James himself fiercely attacks in his work. The
chief idea animating the book is that James advanced no substantive
moral position, and for precise reasons. Against those interpreters who
read in his work either a defense of an eclectic version of utilitarianism,
or an outline of a deontological theory of value, I contend that James’s
intention was precisely that of undermining any attempt to build a moral

theory that would rule our moral lives from above their contingencies.
The critique of ethics, in terms of the advancement of moral theories, is
conducted via a complex examination of the nature and credentials of
our reflective investigation of the moral life as moral philosophers, that
however also pervades our ordinary attitude and approach to moral issues.
As a corollary point, I claim that James aimed at silencing the distinctively
philosophical temptation of thinking and portraying our human possibilities
as inscribed in some fixed picture of the human being that ethics should
honor. Once freed from such companion foundational anxieties, James’s
writings open the way to an alternative path along which rethinking the
very possibility and nature of a philosophical account of the moral life – a
path that is much more robust than the mere series of unrelated consid-
erations which the inconclusivists claim to find in his work.
It is in this context that I shall be exploring James’s seminal but
often unheard contention and instruction that ethics should be horta-
tory rather than prescriptive. Through close analysis of poorly attended
passages, and other texts often neglected altogether by the literature, I
aim at clarifying what according to James such a hortatory ethics might
look like. Given the rather peculiar nature of this proposal, I shall pause
quite some time over the clarification of the various and diverse aspects
of this approach to ethics. According to the reading advanced here,
James would explore this alternative hortatory understanding of ethics
in two main directions: a pragmatic version of the classical conception
and project of self-cultivation as the proper goal of ethics, and a concep-
tual reconsideration of experiencing as an activity of moral significance
against which we build such personal edification. These two related axes
of investigations represent the key to the complexity of James’s reflec-
tion about ethics, avoiding both the charges of inconsistency and the
over-simplification of his views and opening the way to a more imagina-
tive interpretation of his work.
Such inquiry, which at times will take the form of a work of exegesis,
is however moved by the most pressing theoretical motivations. It is
in fact my contention that there is an important lesson to learn from
James about the critique of the way moral reflection has been conceived
in modern moral philosophy – a lesson still to be fully appreciated.
In his writings James in fact challenged with force a very influential
understanding of the scopes of ethics as the analysis and specification
of a series of prescriptions on our moral lives under the form of a moral
theory. This critical concern opens the way to a most positive agenda
for moral philosophy, of which James offered some variations without
however claiming any exhaustiveness, for reasons internal to the nature

of such proposal and to his wider metaphilosophical views.
Such a lesson has been largely unexplored by the scholars: the interest
for this aspect of James’s moral philosophy has been in fact meager and the
connection with his pragmatism overlooked. James’s moral philosophy has
barely been considered along these lines, while much emphasis has been
given to either the alleged promethean character of his ethical reflection –
which would have committed him to an eclectic version of utilitarianism –
or conversely to its intimate and somewhat mystical character – which
would instead explain some other passages of his work in which deon-
tological considerations come to the fore.12 While bearing in mind this
mainstream reading of James, in this work I am interested in following a
slightly different line of inquiry, which is critical of the orthodox way of
reading his work in ethics as foundational and prescriptive.
A close look at James’s moral production will serve as the main clue
of the validity of my reconstruction. In fact, James’s writings on ethics
seem pervaded by an uncanny silence with regard to the very content of
moral philosophy. His writings on the topic have neither the shape nor
the unity of a morality system, and thus a search of moral principles and
prescriptions would be necessarily disappointing. Despite the laments of
the secondary literature, that this condition is a weakness on his part, I
am convinced that this was no accident for James, who was interested
in ethical issues throughout his life. As I will be suggesting, what we find
in James’s writings on ethics is an invitation to look at the moral life
in a novel and reflective way so as to open new fields of experimenta-
tion and problematization, challenging our most rooted intellectual and
ordinary assumptions and often deflecting our practices.
James is not interested in telling us how one should live or act in a
way that is consistent with a set of moral rules or imperatives that are
established independently from the exercise of one’s historicized subjec-
tivity. Nor does he think that this is what moral philosophers should be
doing in the first place. Rather, he is interested in unfolding a certain
way of thinking our moral life as a field for self-fashioning free from the
burdens of some moral prescriptions which dictate its possibilities. Or
perhaps he wants to investigate that interesting field in the light of the
struggle with those moral prescriptions often imposed on us by various
agencies (cultural, social, psychological). If that is so, then moral reflec-
tion should re-think its philosophical credentials and abandon altogether
the dangerous pretension of laying down any foundation or prescription
of our moral life – a philosophical requirement that according to James
often represents the principal source of our ethical troubles.
In James’s writings there seems to be a peculiar concern for the form

moral philosophy might take to convey such a change in perspective and
expectation in regards to its role and scopes. James’s ethical reflection
should thus be framed in the wider context of his overall understanding
of philosophical activity, which as I shall contend he claimed to have a
therapeutic and transformative character. James’s word for these features is
no other than pragmatic, intended in this context as a method to clarify
both one’s ordinary and reflective concepts and assumptions, and experi-
ment with yet unexplored lines of conduct springing from them.
This theme features James’s entire intellectual biography, and in his
ethical writings it takes the form of a hortatory and suggestive register,
whose character has been often skimmed in the literature but whose
importance is according to my reading crucial for the understanding
of James’s innovative approach to ethics. The acknowledgment of this
register will allow us to re-orient ourselves in the intricacies of James’s
writings and reflections on ethics, which form a vexing variety. Contra
either the charges of confusion and inconsistency, or the oversimplified
accounts of James’s writings on ethics offered by the received view, my
reading aims at disclosing a new path, presenting James’s work in ethics
as an articulated philosophical reflection on the role, limits and burdens
of the moral philosopher.
A close engagement with the major interpretations of James’s moral
thought is conducted over this peculiar understanding of the nature and
scope of the moral philosopher. In so doing I will make explicit and qualify
my own association (that is not however free from moments of disagree-
ment) with a small cluster of readers with whom I share some important
insights about this alternative and non-foundational way of reading James’s
work in ethics. In order to commence this undertaking, in the remainder
of this chapter I will explore at some more depth the two main features
of such reconstruction: namely, James’s peculiar understanding of philo-
sophical activity informing such distinctive approach, and the companion
rethinking of moral inquiry as it is depicted in his writings. Even if their
respective particulars will emerge only in the central chapters of the book,
here I shall point out in broader strokes their constitutive features so to
adequately prepare the soil of their more detailed discussion.
The nature of philosophical work and its

bearings for ethics
My reconstruction of James’s work in moral philosophy will be conducted

with the goal of seeing whether and how his contribution might be still
of use for us today, and in what way. The most promising line of inquiry
in this direction would be that of surveying his moral writings in order
to grasp their internal coherence and cogency, and individuated in turn
such structural consistency and theoretical relevance in their methodo-
logical instructions. I have suggested that this last inquiry should be
conducted by making reference to James’s wider considerations about
the very nature and goals of philosophical work against which such
ethical instructions make sense.
By stating that James was interested in changing our own expectations
and assumptions about what moral reflection might and should do for
our moral life, I have started to disclose the metaphilosophical frame-
work at work in such an operation, which, as I also claimed, has often
been overlooked by the literature, thus representing the main source
of disorientation when approaching his writings on ethics. Failing to
appreciate the nature of the wider conception of philosophical activity
in which his work in moral philosophy finds its theoretical and meth-
odological riverbed means depriving oneself of the conceptual resources
for appreciating the distinctive shift that James is suggesting in and
through his ethical investigations.
The characterization of the nature and goals of James’s pragmatism,
understood as a philosophical method, is a most delicate endeavor,
one which will affect the whole reading of his work as well as its
intellegibility. I claim that James defended and articulated a peculiar
version of pragmatism that we might characterize as at once exhorta-
tive and quietist. The point is to question and criticize our intellectual
and ordinary assumptions so as to free ourselves from those philo-
sophical pictures which linger in our projects of self-constitution and
worldmaking. James understood philosophical activity as a therapeutic
and transformative practice which might help us attain a cleared and
possibly wiser take on our life and its possibilities of experience and
growth in meaning. The kinds of exhortations that we find in his writ-
ings are thus not arguments trying to convince us about the validity of
some views held or set forth by James himself; rather, they are invita-
tions to operate and perform ourselves some change in the way we look
and react to the concepts and experiences that hold a grip on us and
inform our ordinary practices.
If, bluntly stated, philosophical reflection should play a practical and
engaging role in our everyday struggles for meaning and signification,
then philosophical texts, rather than revealing and prescribing truths
about the various issues we are grappling with, should instead stimu-
late and instruct us about how to find our way into them. For James a
good philosophical text should not offer us definitive solutions to the

various pressing queries to which we don’t seem to be able to find any
answer, bur rather function as a perspicuous guide to the phenomena
we find perplexing and critically survey our reactions to them in order
to make us mindful about what is at stake in each of their occurrences.
Through his philosophy James aims at making us do something: even
when his voice has the most assertive tone, in his writings we do not
find truths or ideas which are to be accepted, but rather some truths or
ideas to be explored personally and acted upon in original and hope-
fully generative ways. One’s criticism of, and experimentation with,
the notions and thoughts offered to us is in fact for James at once
the benchmark of their validity and the very point of a philosophical-
reflective art of living.
Philosophy understood and practiced in this way should thus
abandon its explanatory ambitions, and stick with the most useful and
needed clarificatory role that characterized its noble Greek origins. In
Pragmatism James drew this connection in his brief but significant
genealogy of the terms “pragma” and “pragmatic method” in the
context of his first public systematic survey of his metaphilosophical
views. The clarifications James had in mind were personal ones: that
is, ways of illuminating one’s critical experiences and situations from
novel or overlooked perspectives favorable to their understanding and
productive handling. The most prominent recent roots of this way of
conceiving philosophical work, and intellectual labor more widely,
can be confidently traced to Emerson. James appreciated Emerson’s
characterization of philosophical texts as spurs and provocations, elab-
orating a peculiar version that productively matched the methodo-
logical assumption of his pragmatism.13 James, like Emerson – and
Wittgenstein14 – conceived philosophical work as a transformative
exercise whose goal was that of a personal conversion, of one’s sensi-
bility as well as of intellectual exigencies, and presented pragmatism,
among other things, as a philosophical method with a transformative
character. The aim is to redescribe philosophical problems so as to
allow the reader to abandon the intellectual and ordinary perspec-
tive impeding her and see distinctively the issues under consideration.
Sometimes, through such peculiar analysis and activity, these prob-
lems dissolve, while in other cases they radically change form. In both
scenarios, however, what changes is one’s very capacity to see them as
either full or rather devoid of meaning, and our ability to recognize
them as genuine.
In the first chapter of Pragmatism, in presenting his most well-known

temperamental conception of philosophy, James writes:
The one thing that has counted so far in philosophy is that a man
should see things, see them straight in his own peculiar way, and be
dissatisfied with any opposite way of seeing them. (P: 12)
The visual metaphor is often reprised by James in his writings. What

interests me here is James’s way of equating the adoption of a philo-
sophical position to a peculiar way of seeing things, and of being dissat-
isfied of the alternative ways. This characterization best illustrates the
transformative conception of philosophical activity James held, since it
portrays the personal dimension of the adoption of a certain philosoph-
ical position through the ways in which the various truths articulating
such position might strike one as more or less adequate, and thus engage
or rather alienate one’s subjectivity. If the adoption of a philosophical
position expresses one’s personal point of view on a certain situation, a
philosophical change would consist in a revolution in overall attitude,
and thus in a shift of the condition of personal fulfillment and growth
that its endorsement implies. In this sense, philosophical reflection,
far from being a discipline investigating problems without reference to
their personal relevance and import, becomes an activity whose goal is
that of making a difference in one’s practical and reflective life.
The most clear and distinct exposition of this peculiar understanding
can be detected in James’s mature writings on pragmatism as a method
and as a conception of truth, though its presence is at work in his writ-
ings on philosophical psychology and on religious experience as well. In
a canonical and well-known passage, James states:
There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference

elsewhere –no difference in abstract truth that doesn’t express itself in
a difference in concrete fact and in conduct consequent upon that fact,
imposed on somebody, somehow, somewhere, and somewhen. The
whole function of philosophy ought to be to find out what definite
difference it will make to you and me, at definite instants of our life, if
this world-formula or that world-formula be the true one. (P: 30)
If the chief teaching of pragmatism is that the meaning of a certain

concept or of a certain notion resides in the practical difference that its
truth entails for those entertaining it and calibrating their conduct after
it, James encourages us to pay attention to the variety of practical differ-

ences that the endorsement of such truths causes to the ones living in
their light.
I suggest that the lesson we should learn from this way of charac-
terizing philosophical reflection is negative in the first place. As James
emphatically writes, “pragmatism does not stand for any particular
results,” as “it is a method only;” pragmatism “appears less as a solu-
tion, then, than as a program for more work, and more particularly as
an indication of the way in which existing realities might be changed”
(P: 31). James claims that his pragmatism is primarily a method (“prag-
matism has no dogma save its method”) for tackling philosophical
problems understood as personal conundrums, and as such it is silent
about their particular contents, of which it does not specify any partic-
ular configuration, leaving to each of us the burden to explore their
possibilities and potentialities. Even the examples that James offers in
Chapters three and four of Pragmatism to present this method at work
should be taken as examples and not as definite answers themselves:
according to this radical perspective “theories thus become instruments, not
answers to enigmas, in which we can rest. We don’t lie back upon them, we
move forward, and, on occasion, make nature over again by their aid.
Pragmatism unstiffen all our theories, limbers them up and sets each
one at work” (P: 32).
Philosophical problems – that is, those problems upon which reflec-
tive speculation is called forth – are for James at once personal and open-
ended because in each of their occurrence we are called to explore the
outcomes of dealing with them in a certain way (this being in a nutshell
what the pragmatic maxim amounts to), as against applying a ready-
made rule or procedure which would tell us how to cope in such cases,
thus closing down the very possibility of experimenting with them. There
would thus be no generalized line of answer to such problems, whose
solution should be sought through the examination of our individual
practices (of thought and conduct alike) for their transformation; also,
no final response can ever be attained, even from such process of self-
scrutiny either, as its very results and consequences should be constantly
re-negotiated in the light of new experiences and reflections.
Read this way, pragmatism would thus be a personal and yet publicly
acknowledgeable device, as it calls into question a method of making
sense of things and tackling problems which gets constantly manifested
in our deeds as well as in the ways in which we open up new fields of
meaning. The pragmatic maxim and principle of signification are to be
put to work piecemeal and tested against one’s particular sensibility and
desiderata, which in their turn are left to others to be scrutinized under

the form of practices of the self. So understood, the “method only” (and
pragmatism tout court) does not serve (nor stand for) a positive program,
but rather represents a tool and expresses an attitude for tackling prob-
lems (or letting them go), and thus for making sense of them in the first
place.15
Such understanding of pragmatism as a philosophical method and not
as a substantive doctrine or positive program suggests a way in which we
can reconstruct James’s overall philosophy as moved by a general preoc-
cupation conferring to it some robust consistency despite its apparent
lack thereof. According to this interpretative line, James was interested
in bringing to light some general temptations and superstitions affecting
our understanding and our practices, which however take specific forms
in each different life and situation. In this framework, the principle of
signification is no technical formula – of which it is often offered a reduc-
tive account in terms of an heuristic device to establish the meaningful-
ness of philosophical disputes which does not require from our part any
personal involvement or active exploration –16, but rather it embodies a
open-ended tactic encouraging a multiplication of solutions which are
context-sensible and inventive in nature. Thus, although in James there
surely is an aspiration to systematicity – especially in his later writings,
where James tries to synthesize years of research and reflection over an
impressive body of issues and disciplines17–, I propose to locate it neither
at the substantive level of a philosophical theory, nor at the procedural
one of a simple filter of philosophical meaningfulness, but rather at the
methodological level of philosophical problematization, in which what
is at stake is a re-orientation of the whole cultural business of reflective
thinking and speculation.
In particular, James would have been interested to show how there
would be an intellectualizing temptation and superstition, of which he aims
at neutralizing the sources by bringing them at the surface of our prac-
tices, featuring various experiential fields of our lives and affecting our
thoughts, discourses, and conduct. In this sense philosophical inquiry
aims at bringing to the surface the difficulties generated by such tempta-
tion in our ordinary and reflective life. Philosophical problems would in
this sense be our problems qua human beings: problems pervading our
practical and intellectual life and that precisely because of that cannot
be resolved once for all by means of any perspectiveless – and presump-
tionless theory or technical expedient. The goal of philosophical work
would thus be a personal change or shift that would free us from the
spell of such temptation and thus profitably re-orient our way of seeing
things. If philosophical problems find their source in our difficulties

and contingencies, and project themselves in our styles of reaction
and reasoning stiffening up to constitute conceptual impediments to our
ability to appreciate and imagine possibilities of experience and conduct
that are expressive of our individuality, their resolution cannot but be
philosophical or reflective. That is, their answer should be internal to that
peculiar dimension of philosophical practice in which they first emerge,
following backwards the path covered by such difficulties and contin-
gencies, from our reflective life in which they solidify to our ordinary
practices in which they often originate. Only in such ways, using James’s
celebrated expression, would we be able to “return to life.”
According to this perspective philosophical problems are recurrent
(if not perennial)18 despite having shifting trajectories and histories;
as such, they cannot be settled by means of any technical or scientific
inquiry – even though, once such investigations are reinterpreted as
human inquiries among others responding to our deepest needs and
cravings, philosophical activity can benefit from certain advancements
in our technical and scientific understanding of ourselves and the
world, if only because they create new challenges and open new fields of
experience and experimentation. Philosophical problems are our prob-
lems and yet live in a wider dimension of temporality that makes them
appreciable and recognizable over time, and thus up to a certain point
communicable between generations.
In his masterpiece The Claim of Reason, Stanley Cavell (1979) talks
about a co-presence of, and dialectic between, natural and conven-
tional elements informing our human condition – in This New Yet
Unapproachable America (1989) Cavell enriches this terminology by
contrasting a vertical (natural, biological, instinctual) to a horizontal
(conventional, ethnological, social) dimension of our forms of life,
and thus of (our practices of) knowledge and conduct. I think James
was working with a similar contrast when he presented philosophical
problems and the methods for their resolution/dissolution as intrinsi-
cally personal or dictated by contingent cultural conditions and yet
making reference to a vertical natural human condition as beings of
a certain kind. It is in the interplay of these two dimensions that we
should be reading the proper optical focus of James’s understanding
of philosophical activity as both naturally informed and contingently
deployed.19
The goal of philosophical reflection would thus be a personal trans-
formation in respect to the way we understand and conduct ourselves in
such puzzles and difficulties that might take different forms depending
on the actors involved and the conditions in which they happen to

move. James was addressing each one of us as human beings with certain
enduring problems while being mindful that such problems could take
different shapes and conditions dependently from the context in which
they are placed and the conditions under which they are analyzed.
Problems have histories as much as their solutions do, defining what
(we might broadly call) our human nature is like and indicating the
venues of its growth and contraction alike.20
Consistent with what George Cotkin argued in his compelling study
of James, I think that the peculiar perspective through which James
engages us can be best explained by the intrinsically public character of
his philosophizing. James was without doubt a professional philosopher
for his whole career (although a rather peculiar one and uncomfortable
with the label, as his correspondence on the issue suggests), and yet he
understood his role as one in which, to borrow Cotkin’s fine descrip-
tion, “the lines between professional and public philosophy are usefully
blurred, excitingly interactive” (Cotkin 1994: 4). For James philosoph-
ical problems were, to use this time Dewey’s famous (and unfortunately
gender imbalanced) expression, “the problems of men,” and as such
the most useful technical work in philosophy should be in the service
of resolving or dissolving what each time human beings found most
perplexing, challenging and even frustrating by clarifying and expli-
cating their respective grounds.
James addressed in and through his work the issues and difficul-
ties that he saw spreading in the society he was acquainted with and
immersed into, and the kind of responses he offered to his various
audiences was always a productive compromise between a technical
solution and a popular plea. Some of the matters and questions he
was addressing dramatically changed, and thus James’s diagnoses and
therapies might sound nowadays either naïve or radically unfamiliar.21
Furthermore, the intellectual status of both professional and public
figures witnessed a radical twist, so that what now would be counted
as either a professional philosopher or a public intellectual does not
easily fit with the same categories of his time.22 And yet what is still
forceful and distinctive is James’s blending of scholarship and oration,
his skilful unique way of mastering philosophical arguments in the
service of those ordinary queries still with us. Our task as contemporary
interpreters of James is to check what we can still do with his work in
order to address our own concerns problems, registering at the same
time the different conditions in which such thoughts have been gener-
ated in the first place.
Cotkin himself registers a therapeutic intent in James’s philoso-

phizing, which took the form of a self-examination and problematiza-
tion of widespread social difficulties. He writes:
The public philosopher engaged philosophy as an act of edifica-

tion and education rather than one of systematization and abstrac-
tion ... William James wanted philosophy to be a conversation, a
playful yet serious and enlightening confrontation with philosoph-
ical and cultural issues ... To a degree, philosophy as edification was
also philosophy as therapy and jeremiad. (Cotkin 1994: 14–15)
In order to appreciate the recurrence of such constitutive features of

James’s writings the reader should embark in the patient yet rewarding
task of exposing herself to those text in their singularity. Each piece of
writing would then works differently, because James thought of them as
punctual incursions into personal and public conundrums employing
different strategies and aiming at disclosing particular possibilities. For
James it would be pointless to treat philosophical problems as mono-
lithic riddles that we can approach with general formulas and from a
neutral standpoint. There were in fact for him no such eternal problems,
whose postulation represents instead one of the leading source of philo-
sophical trouble, but rather only singular (and often recurrent) difficul-
ties that had to be tackled personally and which make sense only within
an intimate appreciation of them as our difficulties projected against
a wider social and cultural context in which we happen to wither or
thrive. Philosophical reflection takes the form of an almost confidential
conversation that at the same time points to our shared practices and
knowledge as the touchstones of their adequacy and effectiveness.
The transformative dimension of philosophical reflection just sketched
challenges us to interrogate ourselves about the kind of reading that his
work requires, and thus about the kind of attention we should pay to it.
In order to fully appreciate the dialectics of his moral writings we should
be mindful of such methodological instructions featuring James’s work,
and look for those formulations which explicitly recall such therapeutic
and transformative dimension. As we shall see, some of these passages
have been the most neglected by commentators, who have system-
atically ignored them in their progressive reconstructions of his moral
thought. Once read together with – and in the light of – other texts
in which James tackles some companion issues on the nature of moral
reflection, these passages would represent the key to decipher what I
take to be the center of his moral vision.
It is interesting to notice how, when approaching his moral writings,

we should pay even more attention to this therapeutic and transforma-
tive register in James’s pragmatism. In fact, in these texts, in addition to
changing the reader’s philosophical point of view on a certain situation,
as we should be expecting following the dictates of his general pragma-
tist approach just outlined, James is also interested in transforming her
moral point of view. If for James the point of a philosophical investiga-
tion of ethics is that of changing our expectations about what moral
reflection (and thus us as moral philosophers) should accomplish, thus
the dialectic of his moral writings would be doubly moved by a trans-
formative exigency which characterizes philosophical work. This critical
point deserves some more elaboration.
The double transformative dimension featuring the articulation of
a philosophical account of ethics can be explicated and explained by
making reference to the therapeutic character of James’s pragmatism as I
have been presenting it so far. We can in fact recognize some moral veins
in pragmatism itself understood as a philosophical therapy: the kind of
transformation required to the reader that such an approach suggests
would assume itself a moral connotation in so far as the kind of work
that one has to undergo is a work on oneself that modifies one’s interests
as well as one’s conception of her human possibilities. We can thus speak
about an ethical intention of pragmatism as a philosophical method: the
goal of James’s pragmatism would be to describe our human practices
in order to bring to the surface the difficulties we encounter when we
alienate our expressive capacities and represent their validity as derived
from a normative dimension independent of them. This alienation of
the self and its expressive possibilities might take moral connotations
when it translates into a mortification of our interiority, which philo-
sophical reflection in a pragmatic grain aims at contrasting by showing
its danger and, to a certain point, its unnaturalness – where the criteria for
naturalness are always internal to the ordinary practices, activities, and
histories articulating our forms of life.
This wider ethical intention pervasively characterizing the very
nature of philosophical activity, when practiced in a pragmatist vein,
is intertwined with the distinctively philosophical intention internal
to the field of moral reflection aimed at changing our moral sensibility
regarding the very methods and contents of morality. According to James
the incapacities obfuscating the field of our expressive possibilities in
ethics are rooted in our tendency to portray the validity of our interests
and the normativity of our judgments and vindications as dependent
on a dimension external or and independent to their being positively
claimed, lived and actively endorsed. In James’s writings, the refutation

of the existence of an absolute point of view conferring authority and
effectiveness on our moral practices, and the companion refutation of
a view from nowhere from which looking at them, takes the shape of
the attack of the conception of moral philosophy as the advancement
of moral theories. According to James, the difficulties we incur when
we portray our moral experiences as independent from the active exer-
cise of our intellectual and practical capacities should be overcome by a
change in the way we portray our contribution to moral reflection. The
role of the moral philosopher would thus be that of explicating such
tendencies and temptations, best portrayed by our castling beyond the
prescriptions of a moral theory, showing their artificiality and danger-
ousness so to free our moral life from the yoke that its over-intellectual-
ization imposes on it.
James suggests to us something very interesting for ethics in respect to
the perspective that such understanding of philosophical activity makes
available, and about the transformations that it triggers in the way we
portray the its scopes and strategies. This peculiar way of thinking about
the relationship between philosophical method and conceptualization
of ethics represents the most characteristic and important product of
James and of the philosophical tradition originated from his writings.
Its accomplishment underlies a radical operation of critique of culture
and human practices in a direction of their anti-intellectualization.
Philosophy is in fact for James a humanistic discipline dealing with
the problems of human beings despite the fact that it developed and
employs a specific, and sometimes internal, lexicon and strategies.
James’s reflection on ethics can be framed in this sense in the wider
debate on the nature of philosophical investigations and of its specific
disciplines which raged at the time in which he was writings and kept
going in the years following his death, characterizing a large part of
the philosophical discussion and production of the twentieth century.
According to James, and differently from Harvard theologians of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that he confronted, ethics would
not be a branch distinct from philosophy – usually afferent to theology –
with the former investigating the nature of the good and of moral obli-
gation in the light of religious and metaphysical considerations, while
the latter mainly focused on epistemological problems. Rather, ethics
becomes a subject of philosophical reflection with a specific language
and distinctively philosophical argumentative strategies. With James
we register a shift in the philosophical orientation on ethics, and thus
an overall change of the very meaning of “ethics:” this would not be
a discipline subordinated to religion or metaphysics, emancipating in

this way from the burden to describe and justify our duties in respect
of god or our place in the universe, but rather consists of an inquiry
into the meaning and nature of our secular moral practices and their
presuppositions.
In this sense we find in James a contemporary conception of philo-
sophical ethics akin in some of its aspects to the treatments offered the
then-novel approach of early analytic philosophy. In his moral writ-
ings James widely discussed the views of Mill as well as of Sidgwick,
Spencer as well as Bradley, and his work has been widely read by the next
generation of moral philosophers, although its appreciation was mixed.
However, James’s moral philosophy, faithful mirror of the complexity
of the philosopher animating it, hardly resembles the various posi-
tions advanced in the twentieth century, and its most accredited recon-
structions – consequentialism, intuitionism and non-cognitivism – all
represent interpretative twisting in respect to its critical intentions of
assessing the foundations and explanatory pretensions variously under-
lining such positions. Since a dialogue with these positions can and
should be detected in James’s moral writings, what is most interesting is
thus investigating its nature and intentions.
According to the reading that I shall defend James discussed such phil-
osophical options, not because of his willingness to endorse any of them
over the other, but rather because he was interested in analyzing their
conditions of possibility and denouncing the philosophical temptations
underlying their hypostatization. As I shall fully articulate in the next
chapter, rather than either embracing them or denouncing their collec-
tive unserviceability, James is most interested in exploring our life with
such moral options, their assumptions and underlying principles: the
relationship we can establish with them, their place in our moral lives
and the motives which prompt us to describe our practices as governed
by a them or rather as resisting their appeal.
Ethical investigations represent in this sense a particular declination
of this most general conception about how to engage in philosophical
reflection, and yet they are not a sheer application of it. In fact, according
to James the moral domain features many specific conceptual issues and
makes reference to practical factors internal to its discourse and subject
matter that render it unlike the other fields of experience and reflec-
tion. There would be in fact for James a revision of the very nature and
meaning of ethics, consequent to the adoption of this understanding
of philosophical practice, whose articulation is the proper goal of his
moral thought.
A shift in the nature and meaning of ethics: James’s

distinctive contribution to moral philosophy
In James’s writings we find thus an overall renegotiation of the very

object, methods and goals of ethics that follows the reconsideration
of the wider significance and working of philosophical reflection.
The upshot of such a shift is nothing short of a search for a third way
beyond the two equally unsatisfying options of moralization (the first-
hand attempt to inculcate a moral view of some kind) and moral theory
(the allegedly detached envisioning of a morality system according to
which justify and regulate our moral conducts): James was interested in
denouncing their converging temptations despite the apparent oppo-
site goals. However, its detection is not immediate at all since when
the reader approaches James’s ethics she experiences an inevitable diffi-
culty. His intellectual biography is in fact characterized by a multitude
of moral writings apparently lacking any clear and immediate unity.
The confrontation with such variety sparked heated discussions that
marked the reconstruction of his moral thought. Secondary literature
has adopted diverse and sometimes divergent strategies by choosing to
concentrate their attention on some parts of his moral production over
others, or instead trying to synthesize them in the name of a general
picture of its significance and articulation.
James’s moral writings form a jarring and irregular ensemble of which
it is hard to guess the harmony, and yet we can read some motifs running
though them, individuating their characteristic and recurrent features.
Far from forcing his writings under a single category, I am interested in
showing how the plurality of meanings and uses of ethics is explored by
James in particularly enlightening directions through which rethinking
the relationship between moral philosophy and the moral life.
To glimpse the lineaments of James’s moral thought is thus no easy
task, since at a first look it seems to weight on his works the absence of a
clear speculative line identifying its theoretical horizons – a lack that, as
already claimed, invited the inconclusivists to vindicate their reconstruc-
tions. In his writings James distributes a great number of miscellaneous
reflections on ethics that seem to escape any attempt to order them
under a single genre. A quick glance at the titles of the texts dedicated
to his moral thought returns us a pretty variegated picture of the themes
allegedly tackled by James under such rubric. We have for example an
“ethics of preference maximization” (Gale 1999); an “ethics of energy”
(Franzese 2008); an “ethics of fulfillment” (Campbell 1981); an “ethics
of the encounter” (Edmonds 2011); an “ethics of strenuous moral living”
(Lekan 2007); and an “ethics of freedom” (Roth 1965), just to name a

few. While part of the records concentrate on some particular aspect of
his moral reflection, others tried to order his writings by suggesting hier-
archies and power balances of various kind and measures.
John Roth, in the introduction to a well known edited collection of
James’s writings gives voice to such difficulty of guessing a common core
of themes and strategies featuring James’s moral reflection. He writes:
This book focuses attention on James’s moral philosophy by

presenting the selections from writings that are at the heart of his
ethical perspective ... James’s analysis of basic ethical questions is a
rich source [of these views]. It is not easy, however, to grasp his total
moral perspective because he never developed a fully unified state-
ment of his position. On the whole his reflection on moral issues are
illuminating, but they are also unsystematic and scattered throughout
his writings. (Roth 1969: 3)
Roth’s selection of texts and themes is particularly interesting since it

reflects the richness and the sophistication of James’s moral thought.
His reading is also paradigmatic of an approach to James’s ethics as a
most congenial but rather rhapsodic proposal, organized according to
Roth around the issues of consciousness and freedom, moral principles
(related to religious beliefs), and pragmatism as a criterion of meaning-
fulness. Despite being sympathetic with the rationale of this general
arrangement, praising its fecundity yet resisting some of its particular
interpretative choices, unlike Roth I do not read the absence of a “fully
unified statement of his position” as a shortfall in his moral philosophy.
There are in fact various ways of understanding the unity of James’s
moral reflection, so that the lack of an articulated defense of a moral
conception does not seem to hinder the task of glimpsing in his writings
a precise speculative line revealing its consistency.
In contrast with those reconstructions of James’s ethical thought
according to which his moral writings would delineate a monotonous
substantial position (the systematizers) as well as with those refuting
any proportion in his views (the inconclusivists), I claim how in
James’s moral symphony there are some arias forming an elaborated
melodic line, of which one can appreciate both the whole line as well
as its singular themes. This, in its turn, assumes a rather different shape
than the one usually delineated by the interpreters who tried to force
its eclecticisms into a rigid model – despite its alleged inclusiveness. By
unfolding the various elements of such a symphony we might grasp the
unity beyond such a multiplicity of texts, so as to gage its characteristic

philosophical cipher.
The reconstructive hypothesis that I will advance, to be verified and
enriched along the way, is that James elaborated a hortatory ethics
placing the peculiar stance individuals might assume toward them-
selves and the world at the center of philosophical reflection. According
to James a piece of moral philosophy must thus be suggestive rather
than prescriptive, hortatory rather than prescriptive. A philosophical
account of ethics aims at questioning the grounds of our moral practices
by describing the way and the conditions through which we endorse
or reject such practices. Ethics must convey the depths and the trivi-
alities of our moral experiences, rather than prescribe which course of
action should be appropriate according to some alleged moral principle.
According to James, when doing moral philosophy we should do some-
thing different than offer theories – let alone dictate moral views to live
by: we should try to elucidate and possibly make sense of the practices
surrounding our judgment of values and our attribution of significance
by making explicit our personal contribution to them and resisting those
cramps of over-intellectualization often troubling our moral life. This I
claim to be James’s timely contribution to ethics, an instruction still to
be properly and fruitfully explored in the contemporary debate.
The difficulty of individuating in James’s moral writings a common
nucleus of questions and of strategies to tackle them would thus be a
calculated consequence of this peculiar operation of rethinking of the
ways in which philosophical reflection should bear on ethics. Once
discarded as both helpless and threatening the possibility of building a
prescriptive morality system, whose weaknesses are explored in depth
in “Moral Philosopher,” James delineates an alternative picture of moral
thought in which the canonical questions of ethics are investigated from
a novel perspective. In his writings there does not seem to be space for
any structured and deep discussion of those moral notions and concepts
usually at the center of a philosophical reflection on ethics, as for
example those of good, right, virtue and duty. Even where James treats
them more articulately, that is in “Moral Philosopher,” his analysis does
not have the shape of an explanation – let alone a foundation – of such
notions and concepts, but rather of a critical investigation of the ways in
which they are used, and of their place and working in our lives.
Far from thinking that the philosophical inquiry on the good, on
justice, on the virtues, and on duties should be abandoned, James
suggests rather how their most fruitful and profound elaboration requires
in the first place a critical examination of the variety of relationships
that we might establish with these notions and concepts, of their weight
in the edification of the self, and of their role in our experiences. The
progressive insistence on the theme of the constitution and care of the
self in the context of her ordinary and reflexive practices of experience
thus allows James to reinterpret some of the typical ethical questions.
Ethics has to do in this sense with the modalities in which we engage
with ourselves when facing moral situations. This alternative concep-
tion is consistent with the metaphilosophical assumptions sketched
in the previous section, according to which in and through his work
James aims at problematizing and challenging both our intellectual
and habitual assumptions guiding our reflective inquiries and ordinary
conducts.
Such general statement of the nature and scopes of ethics finds in
James’s writings the most various uses. One of such uses, a central one
indeed, is nicely conveyed by Giovanni Riconda, who writes:
The great service that [James’s] philosophy can make to ethics [is]
freeing human beings from their intellectual egoism characteristic of
‘absolute’ and monistic philosophies, bringing them to accept diver-
sity. (Riconda 1999: 107)
Such injunction voices an admonition to our inveterate tendency of

assuming the existence of absolutes in the resolution of situations and
clashes in which there are a plurality of views, all equally demanding
and binding; an assumption that according to James we subscribe as
ordinary human beings engaged in the business of our moral lives as
well as philosophers interested in their resolutions by making refer-
ence to some allegedly ultimate principle regardless of its violation of
the undeniable presence of (sometimes painful) diversity as the expres-
sion of our moral singularities. Moral reflection works in this case by
contrasting such assumptions so as to restore us the possibility to see
moral debate as an occasion for self-understanding, self-expression and
adjustment of one’s personal bias and limitations in face of the plurality
of perspectives and world-views others from ours.
Other authors have elaborated similar considerations about the pres-
ence in James’s writings of a moral register pointing to the cultivation
of individuality and recognition of diversity as the proper goal of ethics.
In an instructive chapter of his impressive book on individualism, James
Albrecht (2012) explores the many directions that the cultivation of
our possibilities of experience and self-experimentation might take, of
which ethics is interested in surveying their capacity of shaping a moral
universe in its constitutive elements. The upshot of this project would

be the constitution of both a moral selfhood and a community within a
liberal landscape in which each of us can realize her peculiar potentials
in a way that is useful and profitable for our peers. The author does a
wonderful job in tracing the philosophical resources of this undertaking
in James’s masterful depiction of the plastic and perfectionist nature of
the self. A task undertaken with equally bright results by Mark Uffelman
(2011), who persuasively stresses the theme of self-cultivation and fulfill-
ment in James’s vision of the good life as a meaningful and examined
life. It is very important to note how these authors variously detected
these themes in a whole array of James’s moral writings, resisting to
confine such presence in some tiny portion of them.
Those authors who most forcefully emphasized this transformative
dimension in James’s ethics are Sergio Franzese (2008), Colin Koopman
(forthcoming), James Pawelski (2007), and – with very different argu-
ments and goals – Michael Slater (2009), who variously speak of a valori-
zation of energy, of practices of freedom, of dynamic individualism, and
of human flourishing as the goals of ethics. I will have several occasions
to go back to these texts, and assess their strategies of accounting such
dimension. What I will be mostly interested in detecting is the way, or
lack thereof, in which the theme of self-cultivation and transformation
is related with the critique of moral theories that we found in “Moral
Philosopher,” which I regard as a central text in the economy of James’s
moral thought. It is in fact there that James first sketched in a remark-
able way the theme of self-cultivation in the context of the discussion
of the various aspects of our moral life; a theme which as I will show he
reprised with different emphasis and breadth in other writings as well.
A brief survey of the articulation of James’s moral writings
In the investigation of James’s philosophical reflection on ethics, besides

“Moral Philosopher,” particularly relevant are those writings in which
James tackles the themes of the constitution and discipline of the self
and of the philosophical redescription of our experiencing as an activity
of moral salience: most prominently, The Principles of Psychology (PP) and
the writings on Pragmatism (P) and The Meaning of Truth (MT). There are
also other texts, collected in the volume Talks to Teachers (TT), in which
these themes are virtuously intertwined, representing a cornucopia of
moral illustrations.
In such works we find some of the building elements of James’s moral
thought. In the first place, we find articulated the idea that ethics has
to do with the attention, perceptive and emotional, with those aspects

of reality that we find important to keep alive in our lives and of which
we are interested in exploring the particularities. Connected with this
idea is the conviction that the refinement of this attention involves
a transformation of our interiority and thus of the way in which we
face reality – where what we are willing to even acknowledge as real is
revelatory of important features of our subjectivity and mindset. To be
susceptible to a moral concern involves, according to James, a personal
participation which can take the form of a affective and imaginative
transformation as well as of an adjustment of our attitude toward those
aspects of reality in which such concerns finds place.
If we thus read the dialectics of his moral writings collected in The
Will to Believe (WB) and in the latter part of his Essays on Religion
and Morality (ERM) in the light of what James says in his writings on
psychology, experience, and truth mentioned above, we would attain
a privileged position from which a most sophisticated and interesting
of his moral thought than the one usually recounted becomes avail-
able. Such a survey should be selectively integrated with the reading of
Varieties of Religious Experience (VRE) as well as of a number of smaller
writings – reviews, manuscripts lectures, notes, as well as his personal
correspondence – often ignored by the literature. It is in fact in the inter-
play of these texts that we find articulated considerations or fragments
of observations that give voice to the peculiar overall moral perspective
James aims at conveying.
This inquiry will be however at least in part speculative in its recon-
struction, since in those works the themes informing such approach
are often characterized by a certain open-endedness and tentativeness.
James in fact examines their potentialities in directions that are left
open to us to explore, and that the reader should deepen accordingly
with her personal exigencies. If ethics should have a hortatory rather
than a prescriptive character, we should not be surprised of the absence
in his writings of a system in which inscribing the specifics of a theory
governing our moral life by fulfilling its possibilities. I will thus take at
face value James’s metaphilosophical instruction according to which his
texts work as invitations to philosophical (and in this case moral) reflec-
tion, and thus read the lineaments of his moral thought in the dialectic
of his writings as well as in their silences. My reconstruction would thus
resemble as a tentative prolegomena to James’s own impressionistic
prolegomena to ethics.
As a result of this, the main difficulty characterizing the appreciation
of such particular aspect of James’s reflection on ethics has to do with
the great variety within these texts of moral consideration and strate-
gies articulating such overall picture of ethics. Beyond texts expressively
dedicated to moral issues, we find in fact in his writings texts that treat
arguments of moral relevance, texts whose intention is moral, and texts
with moral implications. Sometimes the philosophical survey of some
aspects of our interiority seems directly relevant for ethics, as in the
case of the description of the pragmatic anthropology offered in PP.
In some other cases the description of some entrenched attitudes and
tendencies aims at showing some connected moral deficiencies, as for
example emerges in those passages of P (e.g. chapters six and seven) and
of MT (chapters two and eleven) in which James criticizes the picture
of experiencing as a mere passive mirroring of the world as the condi-
tion that makes us morally blind toward determined situations in which
the active exercise of our sensibility would be required, a picture also
thematized in “On A Certain Blindness in Human Beings.” In still other
texts the discussion of some metaphysical or religious issues is resolved
by making reference to the ethical implications of their resolution in a
certain direction would bring about (or vice versa), as for example in the
moral advantage in the adoption of a certain philosophical position in
respect to the pluralistic as opposed to the monistic nature of reality, a
possibility discussed in “The Dilemma of Determinism.”
James’s considerations on several philosophical issues are in this sense
variously marked by moral concerns, and it is not easy to characterize
the relationship among these different aspects of his moral perspective.
My conjecture is that all these texts tackle from different points of view
and with different accents the theme of the constitution of the self in
the wider context of the activities and experiences constituting her prac-
tical horizons. James resists with force, showing its dangerousness in the
various situations in which our individuality is asked to pronounce its
word, those intellectualistic assumption and descriptions that tend to
mortify the variety of outlooks and attitudes that we might assume on
ourselves and the world, describing the confines of our experiencing and
its expressive potentialities. This menace interests several philosophical
discussions – those concerning our deepest metaphysical convictions
as well as those about the kind of access we have to our interiority or
those of others – and finds in the moral issues a most thorny case, as
the dialectic of “Moral Philosopher” compellingly conveys. James is
interested in showing how such diverse discourses underly a common
problematic that finds expression in different circumstances: that is,
the ways in which our individuality can be stimulated to pronounce its
practical exigencies, or rather can be alienated in their mortification. I
suggest how the variety of uses of ethics that we find in James’s writings
should be harmonized along this theoretical reconstruction, delineating
its overall physiognomy and seizing its distinctive traits.
A last concern about reading James: philosophy,

biography, and ethics
Connected with the difficulty of finding an harmonic moral tune in

the complexity of James’s work there is an extremely telling tension,
internal to James’s moral writings but of a more general order, to be
mentioned. I am thinking about the tension between those texts vari-
ously dedicated to the critical discussion of various moral issues and
the moral preoccupation pervading most, if not all, James’s writings. His
biographers widely remarked that from his youth James was consumed
by moral interrogatives, often stimulated by the conversations with his
father Henry James Sr. on life matters and Swedenborgian teachings.
It is interesting to note that his first “philosophical” remark of which
we have track, when aged 16 James confided to his friend Edward Van
Winkle “What ought to be everyone’s object in life? To be as much use
as possible” (C2: 346), was nothing short of a moral claim. As the most
attentive literature did not fail to notice, James’s early and late philo-
sophical reflection was animated by moral scruples that orientated his
researches and positions. Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam claimed for
example how the register informing some of his writings, far from being
at the service of the elaboration of a moral theory, expresses rather an
ethical motif. They write for example how “attention to James’s ethical
intentions is essential to an understanding of him ... . Early and late,
James’s motivation was ultimately ethical” (Putnam 1994: 217). Antonio
Santucci echoes Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam when he writes that “in
the case of James we should talk of a moral attitude more than a real
moral doctrine” (Santucci 1969: 67). I am here interested in stating how
the presence of this ethical motif and moral attitude, if read as the sheer
expression of James’s own moral views creates some complications in
the reading of James’s ethics, since it seems to endanger the individu-
ation of which are the relevant texts for a study of his moral thought,
and how to characterize their ethical instructions. If in fact James’s prag-
matism and radical empiricism are variously imbued with moral motifs,
and in turn such motifs would represent his personal convictions only,
then it will be difficult to appreciate a precise theoretical line indicating
any properly philosophical theme in his ethical work – a theme which
would help us sorting out his work as a moral philosopher.
The presence of such latent tension in his writings seems at the

same time to encourage and invalidate the thesis according to which
his moral reflection would have a hortatory character. Such presence
can be in fact understood either as a reflective, and thus throughout
philosophical, feature detectable in some of his writings exploring its
contexts of use and applicative possibilities, or as the mere expression
of his personal moral views. While the former reading suggests the idea
of the research of a refined intertwinement between the reflective and
ordinary discourse, the latter tend to delegitimize the reflective dimen-
sion by negating any autonomy from the exquisitely biographical one.
While the former portrays James’s exhortations as invitations to engage
ourselves in evaluating the moral significance of a determinate situation
or of the acceptance of a certain philosophical view, the latter opens the
way for an interpretation of his moral thought according to which in
his writings it is James the moralist speaking, trying to convince us to
endorse a particular idea or worldview he first-hand lived by (or maybe
failed to come to terms with) in his personal life.
In his monumental work on James, Ralph Burton Perry suggests this
second line of interpretation. In presenting James’s moral thought, Perry
blends together a series of moral considerations taken from some of his
writings – of which he traces no distinctions of kind nor purpose – as
well as from personal testimony in which would emerge James’s constant
and widespread ethical concern. Perry explicitly stresses the moralistic
and militant nature of his ethics, writing that:
There is an undeniable moral accent in the life of as well as in the

thought of James. In the view of the fact that he subordinated
thought to action, and therefore in principle accepted the Kantian
doctrine of the “primacy of practical reason”, it is surprising that he
wrote so little on moral philosophy. But this comparative inattention
to the traditional problems and theories of ethics was offset by the
strength of his moral convictions. His total expression was infused
with moral zeal –his personal code was rigorous and unmistakable.
(Perry 1935: 250)
This quotation is revelatory of many of the assumptions often informing

the reading of James’s moral thought, such as the charge of apparent
small figure of his moral production, connected with his alleged inat-
tention to traditional problems of ethics, if compared with his personal
strong moral commitments. In this context it is interesting to concen-
trate on one aspect of Perry’s reconstruction, progressively deposited in
the readings of James and imposing itself as one of the most credited
interpretative hypothesis: that is, the characterization of James’s moral
positions as the result of his personal ethical opinions. Perry in fact
introduces his account of James’s moral philosophy by stating that:
James’s ethics was not derived from or profoundly influenced by the

ethics of any other philosopher. It was the product of his general
philosophical thinking together with his personal traits and atti-
tudes. (Perry 1935: 261)
Perry repeats this strong claim in a later collection of James’s moral

and religious essays he edited. Even if in this text he slightly adjusted
his reading, since he now acknowledges the special place of “Moral
Philosopher” in his moral production, Perry still reads James’s moral
philosophy as largely an articulation of his personal creeds. He writes:
It so happens that James’s utterances on ethics were occasional, and

in their scattered published form they failed to convey an adequate
sense of the author’s constant preoccupation with moral questions,
or the consistency of his thought in that field. His only systematic
discussion of the problems of ethical theory is contained in the essay
titled “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life”, while the most
forceful statements of his own moral attitude are contained in essays
entitled “Is Life Worth Living?” and “On a Certain Blindness in
Human Beings.” (Perry 1947: vi)
Despite the effort to show the intertwinement between biography and

philosophy in James is a most welcomed accomplishments, since such
connection has been remarked by James himself in his moral writings,
Perry goes as far as reducing his philosophical reflection to his biograph-
ical details and events, losing in this way the most interesting reflec-
tive dimension of his moral thought. Perry portrays this dimension as a
consequence of his personal ideas, even conceding that in some writings
James actually engaged in some more systematic or theoretical work in
moral philosophy.
Even with the conviction that a detailed acquaintance with his life
is a necessary element for appreciating his views, the moral ones and
the ones on ethics in the first instance, still I resist a reduction of the
philosophical component to the merely biographical.23 In the discourse
over the coordinates of an alternative, non-reductionist reading of the
connection between philosophy and biography in James it will be useful
to trace some distinctions between wider and most specific issues in

which such relations enter the scene.
The theme of philosophy and biography is of particular relevance for
the characterization of the hortatory register pervading James’s moral
thought, and of the wider transformative character of philosophical
reflection. James’s considerations on the nature of philosophical prac-
tice and the motives that prompt us to engage in it – as, for example,
the central role of temperament in the adoption of certain positions or
in the elaboration of specific inquiries mentioned in a previous section –
suggests a contiguous and immediate connection between philosophy
and biography insomuch as it seems fair to say that, when James is voicing
them, it is not only the philosopher speaking but also the human being;
and that, most importantly, he is addressing not only philosophers, but
the human beings in flesh and blood they so often forget to be. As James
once wrote, “[p]hilosophers, let them be as queer as they will, still are
men in the secret recess of their hearts, even here at Berkeley.” (P: 257–8)
However, such considerations, even investing the ordinary dimension
of our practices and inquiries, by having as their object some individuals
with their conundrums and difficulties as they are experienced in their
reflective stance toward such practices and inquiries, are philosophical in
kind, and thus their discussion should proceed at a reflective level. What
in fact James calls for is, among other things, a transformation in the
way in which individuals represent and explore themselves their respec-
tive styles of philosophical reasoning, and in particular the modality in
which one’s personal contribution might be enhanced or rather frus-
trated in the adoption of a certain philosophical view. If thus James’s
words and diagnoses aspire to a certain degree of generality, despite
being rooted in his personal experiences and insights, we should resist
the temptation to read them as mere idiosyncrasies of his personality
not directly addressing at a reflective level his readers.
For what regards the most specific considerations on the nature of
ethics and its companion issues of self-constitution and moral experi-
encing the connection between philosophy and biography should be
complicated even further. While it seems reasonable to claim that some
events of his life might have brought him to question such themes, and
even shaped his point of view on them (his examples are in fact often –
if not exclusively – drawn from personal experiences, both first-personal
or derived from his own encounters with literary texts), this hardly seems
to be the last thing to say about them. There would in fact be for James
an activity of reflective elaboration on ethics that is at the very same
time instigated by and directly relevant for our particular biographies,
but whose register and strategies, of an hortatory kind in the case at

hand, are irreducibly philosophical in the measure in which they try to
speak to the reason as well as to the imagination of his audience.
The failure in the appreciation of this reflective dimension compro-
mises the comprehension of the peculiarity of James’s philosophical
operation on ethics and with moral reflections, and has been the impedi-
ment which stood in the way of an imaginative understanding of those
writings which contain such dialectics. Once free from the superstitious
view according to which our moral life should be regulated after the
dictates of a moral theory spinning its fates from the above of human
contingency, defending a thick conception of moral reasoning, whose
point is that of transforming the very internal understanding we have of
our ordinary moral life. Read in this way, that is as reflective considera-
tions of an hortatory kind, James’s ideas and arguments would at once
be representative of his personal rumination and expressive of a genu-
inely conceptual point.
These two aspects, philosophy and biography, should be thus kept in
contrastive tension, since the subordination of one on the other would
result in either a suffocating conception of philosophy, in which any
personal contribution is banished, or the opposite extreme of philos-
ophy’ annihilation, in which the very activity of reflective inquiry
would be exiled. In the case of ethics, for James this dialectic is inscribed
in the very nature of its methods and subject matter, constituting a
central axis of his moral thought. The Janus- faced figure of the moral
philosopher represents the best example of this tension: James figures in
philosophical reflection on ethics as the moral philosopher engaged in
the first person in the analyses and possibly resolutions of moral issues
and difficulties, and also as the very object of such reflective inquiry,
investigating its limits and point.
2
Questioning Moral Theory and
the Shape of Ethics
A critical survey of James’s conception of the nature and scope of phil-

osophical activity is necessary for the understanding of his work as a
moral philosopher. In his most famous and celebrated ethical essay,
“Moral Philosopher,” James employs the exhortative register to feature
his therapeutic and transformational understanding of philosophical
reflection. It is thus quite surprising that this register has gone virtually
unnoticed by the literature. While there have been authors who resisted
the reconstruction of the essay as a piece of moral theory by noticing
the anti-theoretical gist of its dialectics,1 still the peculiar nature of
this critical project has been inadequately characterized. Furthermore,
this cluster of dissenting authors represents a small and heterogeneous
portion of James’s readers compared to the mainstream who forcefully
interpret his work in ethics as a prescriptive moral theory. Evidence for
such interpretations are most likely found in the “Moral Philosopher”
essay.2 Given that this same text is widely retained as the most important
and substantive – if not the only – contribution by James to ethics, it is
no surprise that his overall moral thought has been read quite consist-
ently in the light of such foundational premises.
In approaching “Moral Philosopher” with the goal in mind of
contrasting this received and widely accepted picture, not only shall we
abandon the “habits of one interpretative style, which seek to connect
James’s moral thought with one or another school of ethical philos-
ophy” (Franzese 2008: 4), as one of the most provocative dissenting
voices suggests, inviting us to look elsewhere in order to detect his
distinctive contribution to ethics; we will also and foremost have a better
grasp of this seminal essay, thus finding previously overlooked instruc-
tions about how to approach his other writings as well. It is my conten-
tion that, only by rescuing “Moral Philosopher” from the foundational
48
Questioning Moral Theory and the Shape of Ethics 49
slumbers in which it has been restricted, will a more interesting picture

of the other parts of James’s moral thought come into view.
This task is, however, not an easy one. There is in fact an inveterate
and, notwithstanding the many attacks, suspiciously healthy reading of
William James as a moral theorist. This interpretation has precise and
definite historical roots, which could be traced back to the very influ-
ential account of James’s moral thought offered by R. B. Perry in the
second volume of his monumental The Thought and Character of William
James. According to this reading – which gained widespread agreement
about the nature, content and scope of his moral philosophy – James,
especially in “Moral Philosopher,” advanced an eclectic version of conse-
quentialism which stresses the interest of human beings as the proper
target of moral concern and individuates the principle of morality in its
maximization. Perry writes:
The principle is clear: value derives ultimately from the interests of

the individual; and the social whole is justified by the inclusion and
reconciliation of its individual parts. Individualism is fundamental.
(Perry 1935: 265)
Perry’s interpretation has been variously challenged over the past

75 years due to the anti-utilitarian flavor of some passages and the
companion emphasis on (what appear to be) deontological principles,
which inform some of James’s writings.3 Still, Perry’s fundamental
assumption is currently fully in vogue: it is still widely acknowledged
that in those works James advances a moral theory, whatever its specifics
and character. Orthodox readers, despite their different reconstructions
of James’s moral theory, greatly outnumber heterodox readers and their
sympathizers, and the former’s interpretative line is still very healthy
and popular.
I am interested in challenging this mainstream assumption by refuting
its two chief tenets: namely, the idea that what James is advancing is a
moral theory, and the idea that the articulation of his moral philosophy
is confined to some specific texts that allegedly outline its details. The
two claims are strictly intertwined, so that the refutation of the former
calls for the refutation of the latter. In fact, once such moral texts are read
attentively, a certain intended open-endedness of both form and content
becomes apparent. In these texts, James does not seem to advance any
moral theory; rather, he points to certain insights and critical themes
later elaborated at more depth (or with different emphasis) in some other
moral writings, as well as in those writings which are not immediately
recognizable as such. On the other hand, once we start to investigate

this latter group of writings, also suffused with moral considerations, the
attempt to find a blueprint for a moral theory gradually becomes unten-
able. The former strategy moves directly from James’s major moral writ-
ings in order to show their queerness as substantive and foundational
moral writings – that is, as writings advancing a moral theory; the latter
moves instead from his more impure moral writings in order to show
something about the nature of ethics altogether. By addressing both strate-
gies, I will show their strength and grip once joined together.
In my view, this way of proceeding, though not the only one possible,
is the most promising. In fact, in addition to throwing light on other-
wise obscure passages, this method substantially undermines the recur-
rent charge of inconsistency in James’s moral thought. According to this
charge, James in his writings (or even within the same text) held incom-
patible views. Rather than trying to resolve those alleged inconsistencies
by amending some of his views – and thus twisting their saying because
of interpretative epicycles – I suggest an overall re-orientation of our
interpretative lenses.
The critical passage of this rejoinder lies once again in the reception
and understanding of “Moral Philosopher,” which is by far one of the
most challenging essays written by James, despite its apparent linearity.
As already presented in the previous chapter, one very influential narra-
tive depicting “Moral Philosopher” as the blueprint of a moral theory
claims that the substantive positions stated in that essay would clash with
the themes pervading his other writings – variously covering the themes
of heroism, perfectionism, meliorism, and the essential value of indi-
viduals – whose very objects resist precisely any normative generaliza-
tion of the kind prescribed by a moral theory. However, when resisting
such a foundational reading of the essay, through a careful examina-
tion of its dialectic and wider metaphilosophical points, we will be able
to appreciate the consistency of James’s reflections on themes tackled
by his other writings, in which the author reprises the theme of the
problematization of the way moral reflection addresses the moral life,
exploring it in different directions and with different emphases. It is
in the context of this wholesale approach to ethics that such themes,
suffusing his moral writings, should be read and assessed.
According to the reading that I shall be defending in this chapter,
“Moral Philosopher,” considered by many as “James’s sole sustained
work on theoretical ethics,”4 far from representing the vindication of a
moral theory, rather consists in an inquiry into its very presuppositions
and prospects. The interpretation of the essay as a work in theoretical
ethics originates in a superficial reading of some passages in which James

seems to defend a version of the principle of the maximization of utility
and a consequentalist conception of value.
This reading commits a double-category mistake: I will claim that the
oft-defended reading of James as a prescriptivist thinker, of the conse-
quentialist and hedonistic kind, is off-target for two orders of reasons. In
the first instance because in other passages, often contained in the very
same pages of the ones allegedly brought as proof of his consequentialism
and hedonism, James is critical of some central assumptions of their
respective moral epistemology and psychology; and secondly because
his paramount intention, in “Moral Philosopher” as well as in other
texts, is to show how neither consequentialism nor any other alterna-
tive normative positions – such as, deontologism, natural law and even
Darwinism – if understood as prescriptive theories pretending to govern
each aspect of our conduct and interiority, result adequate to meet the
peculiar difficulties of our moral life. Similar considerations apply to
hedonism (or, for that matter, to legalism or intuitionism) as regards the
meta-ethical explanation of the source of our moral evaluations.
This anti-prescriptive motif, which James articulates in terms of a
critique of moral theories understood as pervasive devices that try to
rule each aspect of our moral life from the above of its peculiarities and
contingencies, represents the central feature of his moral thought, and
the foremost difficulty in its appreciation is that this critical register is
intertwined with a most positive motif. In fact, after criticizing a certain
way of understanding moral reflection as the advancement of moral
theories, James gives us some hints about the form moral thought should
take in the light of such critiques.
Any comprehensive account of James’s re-descriptive project must
demonstrate awareness of his methodological nuances. The critique of
moral theories as the privileged pathways of philosophical inquiry on
ethics is thus combined with an alternative characterization of its ambi-
tions and form, exhortative and not prescriptive, which James explores
in various directions in his moral writings but whose presence can be
prominently detected in “Moral Philosopher.” The individuation of the
persistence of this anti-theoretical register in ethics combined with an
hortatory dimension of moral reflection represents the key to the vexed
riddle – thematized by virtually any interpreter of James’s moral thought
without however finding any convincing explanation – of the relation-
ship between “Moral Philosopher” and his other moral writings, charac-
terizing this relationship in non-foundational terms and thus avoiding
the interpretative twists in which a large representative of the literature
fell.5 In order to accomplish this task we should in the first instance

understand what James – especially in “Moral Philosopher” – meant by
“moral theory,” and thus what would count as its critique.
Rescuing “Moral Philosopher” from foundationalism
“Moral Philosopher” is at the same time one of the most quoted and
yet among the most misunderstood of James’s essays – a record it shares
with “The Will to Believe.” Most of the contemporary discussion around
James’s moral philosophy in the literature focuses around the alleged
clash of deontological considerations with the utilitarian ones alleg-
edly informing his writings.6 Authors such as Brennan, Kloppenberg,
R. A. Putnam and Schrader7 claim that deontological considerations are
pervasive in James’s ethical writings, and also detectable in some parts
of “Moral Philosopher,” where instead it is utilitarian ones that seem
to be overriding; authors such as Gale, Madden and Boyle8 argue back
that this presence, where appreciable, does not play any substantial role
since James is clearly a consequentialist of some guise.
What is however important to stress from my perspective is that both
parties, despite departing in several points of interpretation, share the
central assumption that what James is offering is a version of a moral
theory,9 an assumption that I claim to be misplaced. Such an under-
standing is the result of a somewhat superficial analysis of the very
dialectic of “Moral Philosopher,” to which most of his readers gave
scarce weight in the economy of the essay, together with a problem-
atic understanding of James’s conception of philosophical activity
informing it, when the latter is considered at all. It is my ambition to
show that, once viewed in the proper light, the dialectic of the essay
will reveal its real stakes: namely, an exercise of conceptual criticism
of the very image of moral reflection aimed at showing the dangerous-
ness of conceiving ethics “in the old-fashioned absolute sense,” that is
as “dogmatically made up in advance” in splendid isolation from the
human beings that should be inhabiting it. This picture of ethics, I shall
claim, is consistent with James’s metaphilosophical approach sketched
in the previous chapter.
According to this reading, in “Moral Philosopher” James is neither
interested in defending any theory of morality whatsoever, nor in indi-
viduating the principles of human nature on which such an ethics
should be built. His interest is rather in showing the shape moral reflec-
tion should take in order to meet the difficulties of the moral life it
should address instead of hiding itself behind a moral theory or some
given metaphysical picture of human nature. James claims that if moral

reflection aspires to have a genuine grasp of the moral life it should
rethink its very credentials and investigate in the first instance what
relationship it should entertain with the varieties of moral experiences
articulating our moral life. This re-orientation of the aims of moral
philosophy, which represents a corollary of his general understanding
of philosophical activity, is outlined in several directions. In “Moral
Philosopher” James explores some central aspects of our moral life, and
shows how a deceiving picture of the way in which we depict the moral
values, norms, and principles we live by is the cause of many of the
troubles featuring it.
James wrote “Moral Philosopher” in 1891 as an address to the Yale
Philosophical Club. Given the academic setting of the lecture, it is my
contention that James’s interest was that of showing the limits and point
of a philosophical account of morality. The shape of the lecture-essay
would not in fact suggest that James’s aim was that of advancing and
defending any particular moral theory, but rather investigate its very
conditions of possibility. This point has been surprisingly overlooked,
in certain cases perhaps intentionally, by both his audience and by the
critical literature on James. There is a series of clues that suggest this
reading, both in the text and elsewhere.
In a letter to his brother Henry, dated February 15, 1891, James
describes the reactions to his lectures on ethics, delivered some days
before. He writes:
All intellectual work is the same, – the artist feeds the public on his
own bleeding insides. Kant’s Critique is just like a Strauss waltz, and
I felt the other day, finishing “The Light That Failed”, and an ethical
address to be given at Yale College simultaneously, that there was
no essential difference between Rudyard Kipling and myself as far
as that sacrificial element goes. I gave the address last Monday to an
audience of about a hundred, absolutely mute. Professor Ladd, who
was my host, did not by a single syllable allude to the address after
it was delivered, either on our walk home or the following morning.
Apparently it was unmentionable. (C2: 175)
This rich passage contains some elements illuminating the central

aspects of James’s conception of ethics. In the first place we find the
direct comparison between philosophical and literary work, a recur-
ring theme of his writings. James will reprise this theme in ways that
are congenial to the discourse on the nature of moral thought that he
explicitly thematizes in “Moral Philosopher,” where he calls for a re-ori-

entation of the way moral philosophy is conceived and practiced. In
the final sections of the essay James reprises the comparison between
ethics and literature, calling for a radical change in the conception of
both philosophical writings and its contents. James stresses this compar-
ison in other writings too, integrating his prose with many extended
quotations from Stevenson, Tolstòj, Whitman, and Wordsworth among
others, that he uses as philosophical texts, not only as literary exam-
ples of philosophical argumentations. In works such as “On a Certain
Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes a Life Significant,” James
widely draws from such authors, and treats the insights and arguments
of their writings in the same manner as he does the philosophical ones
of Kant, Mill and Spencer.10
In the passage quoted James also tells us something very interesting
about the kind of reaction that his address received in 1891, a reaction
connected in my opinion with his belief in the contiguity between
ethical and literary writing. The reaction to the lecture – which he tells
us of in the letter to his brother, which was replicated later that year
when the essay was published in the International Journal of Philosophical
Studies, and in 1897 when it was collected in The Will to Believe – was
essentially one of indifference and timid response. James, as he wrote
in a letter to his French translator M. Frank Abauzit, was extremely
disappointed by this lukewarm reaction, because he believed that the
lecture essay was by far the best piece of the volume. In particular, he
regretted his inability to convey his conviction to the public. I believe
that this coldness was rooted in a deep miscomprehension by James’s
public, and by his readers, of the very point of the text he lectured,
and should thus be attributed to James’s radical approach to moral
reflection. The deplacémant of his public, in fact, can be explained by
the originality of the kind of work that James did in the essay, as well
as of its goal; it is thus motivated not by a substantial contrast with
the thesis advanced but rather by the incomprehension of its very
dialectic.
The key to understanding why the address was apparently “unmen-
tionable”, as James wrote to his brother, would thus reside in the
distance between the audience’s expectations and James’s philosophical
aims in the lecture. One of the foremost difficulties that readers, looking
for a lineament of a moral theory in James’s conference on ethics, had
encountered is in fact that of taking for granted what they were looking
for, and often being puzzled at not finding it. Readers were either pleased
or disappointed with the text, without however having challenged their
expectations: which was precisely what James had thematized and

encouraged them to do. In “Moral Philosopher” James problematized
the very nature and possibility of what his readers were expecting from
him: namely, a defense of a substantive moral theory of a kind philoso-
phers of his time (and of ours) used to advance.
James was in fact writing in the heyday of the grand prescriptive
systems (utilitarianism and Kantianism above all), but his work – and
that of his fellow pragmatists – can be read as a first attack on this way of
understanding the very task and aims of moral philosophers. This attack
would also be launched by the then-rising analytic movement. The two
traditions, however, despite multiple close exchanges and cross-ferti-
lization (both historical and theoretical), took rather divergent paths,
having a different understanding of the limits of moral theorizing and
thus elaborating different strategies for its overcoming.
It is my contention that the the circle of expectations on what moral
philosophers should be doing (and thus about moral philosophy as a
reflective endeavor) was exactly what James aimed at problematizing
and eventually breaking up in “Moral Philosopher:” what is explored at
depth in the essay is in fact the very statute of philosophical reflection
on ethics in relationship to our availability in regulating our moral life
on the dictates of a moral theory determining its possibilities. Given
its critical aims, we can thus say that the déplacement of the audience
would thus be in a certain sense an intentional, if not completely
explicit, consequence of the essay, and should thus be considered one
of its constitutive aspects, rather than a weakness. This is very likely
why his audience showed such a cold reaction: James in his address
tried to change their philosophical sensibility by outlining a new radical
approach to ethics. He challenged the expectations of his audience (and
readers), which were systematically frustrated on finding no lineament
of a moral theory in his lecture, which they unreflectively expected and
in some cases secretly craved for.
In my opinion this frustration is precisely the same as contempo-
rary readers of James experience, expecting from his essay a defense of
a moral system, variously characterized. Readers of James have been
mostly suspicious and critical of the ideas advanced in the lecture,
and a similar thunderous silence would likely characterize the reaction
to “Moral Philosopher,” were James to present it today in front of an
academic audience, which still expects some theory or system to be
defended and argued for. What impedes proper understanding of the
positions advanced by James is the overlooking of, or in certain cases
the intentional refusal to notice, the tone and dialectic of the essay. James
wanted to communicate a change in the method of philosophical reflec-

tion, as well as its goals and stakes.
In “Moral Philosopher” James depicts moral reflection as an investi-
gation of the ways in which we understand the relationship between
moral philosophy and the moral life it addresses to be like, and not
as a foundation of the latter on the former performed by some piece
of theoretical machinery. In the essay James encourages us to enact
a change in the way in which moral reflection should be conceived
and practiced, and thus of the way in which we depict the very role
of the moral philosopher. While the essay has been read as a defense
of a particular substantive moral position, according to my reading
James’s interest was not to add yet another option to the already
crowded ethical stage of the time, but rather to show the form that
moral reflection should take in order to effectively address the diffi-
culties of the moral life.
A notable exception to the received view of the essay is the work by
Franzese on James’s moral philosophy, in which the author advances an
interpretation of “Moral Philosopher” on lines that are in part congenial
to the reading I am defending. That is, he presents the text as a critical
inquiry into the very nature and feasibility of moral reflection rather
than as a defense of a moral theory itself. Franzese argues in fact that a
more attentive inquiry will reveal how:
The essay of 1891 does not work as an outline of a moral theory

because it was certainly not intended to be one. On the contrary, it
was intended to show the futility of that traditional philosophical
task, which is perhaps why philosophers have intended not to read it
too closely ... ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’ is a critical
analysis of the validity of any moral theory, in the terms of its rela-
tion to the moral philosopher, rather than presenting another specific
moral theory. (Franzese 2008: 3)
Although I agree with the overall line of this criticism of the orthodox
approach to the essay, my reading of “Moral Philosopher” diverges in
one crucial aspect: while for Franzese the essay has only a negative aspi-
ration – namely, that of showing how any project of critical reflection on
morality is doomed to fail because of the elusiveness of its very object – I
think that it conveys a more positive and profound message: that is, that
we can save a space for reflectivity in the ethical domain and still resist
the prescriptive and foundational drift of much philosophical theoriza-
tion on the moral life.
Our disagreement thus amounts to a different understanding of the

method as well as of the aims of the essay, and thus of its importance
in the economy of James’s writings on ethics. According to Franzese,
in the lecture James was interested in showing the futility of any
philosophical approach to moral reflection, due to its inbuilt prescrip-
tive pretensions; Franzese reads in James the recommendation to look
elsewhere (and precisely to our psychological constitution and anthro-
pological make-up) for any interesting work in ethics. I think that the
essay does something much more interesting than suggest a renunciation
of the whole business of philosophical reflection on ethics (and thus
the discussion of such notions as goods, values and principles), or even
to abandon the very language of moral theory altogether – to the extent
that it bears any normative weight – in search for empirical explana-
tions of diverse historical, social, and personal moral views. The latter
empirical explanations too, can in fact take the shape of a foundational
project (despite being a-posteriori rather than a-priori, as in the case
of ahistorical, intellectualistic moral theories). Rather than dismissing
altogether ethical inquiry as a philosophical enterprise with normative
aspirations of a transformative kind, James wants to challenge some of
the foundational desiderata that we often project on such reflective task,
so to rethink the very relationship between moral reflection and moral
practices along non-foundational lines and thus open new possibilities
of ethical inquiry.11
Once freed from some misplaced attributions and returned to its
proper fieldwork, a more positive picture of moral reflection will be
revealed through the lines of the essay. According to my reading, in
“Moral Philosopher” James is interested in showing if, how, and to what
extent our moral life can be pictured and understood by means of moral
reflection, and thus the essay aims at investigating and problematizing
our life with moral values, principles, norms, and even theories instead
of dismissing them altogether. In Franzese’s reconstruction of “Moral
Philosopher” there is no recognition of this critical but most positive
register, leaving unexplained why James never abandoned the task of
surveying and assessing our presuppositions and shortcomings when
doing moral philosophy. The same task, on his understanding, should
not be confined to the production of theories and generation of princi-
ples but should rather aim at making us mindful of their very assump-
tions and pretensions.
A first clue to the validity of this line of inquiry lies precisely in James’s
comment about the engaged and engaging dimension of his work as a
(moral) philosopher, of which we find an expression in the excerpt of
his letter to his brother Henry. It is in fact noteworthy that James couples
the overlapping of philosophical and literary work with the cold reac-
tion of his public to his lecture, as it suggests a possible explanation of
the almost embarrassed response that “Moral Philosopher” has received
since its appearance. According to this reconstruction, the puzzling
reaction to the text would be motivated by the failure to recognize and
appreciate the similarities between philosophical and literary writing, in
which the author “feeds the public on his own bleeding insides,” and
evaluates the success of her work, characterized as a “sacrificial element,”
by the reactions of those facing and exposing themselves to it. In “Moral
Philosopher” James wants to change the reader’s sensibility just as the
best literature tries to change the reader through its narrative. James,
like Kipling or Tolstòj in their novels, aims at stimulating the reader to
question her personal convictions and styles of moral reasoning, and offers
his prose as an instrument through which one might gain a privileged
position from which to resolve the difficulties pervading one’s moral
life. Missing this transformative register stands at the origin of many of
the misunderstandings of the essay and of the wider point of his moral
investigations witnessed in the literature. In “Moral Philosopher” James
wants to change the reader’s sensibility through an argumentative and
imaginative journey, just as the best literature changes sensibility via
imagination and narrative.
In and through his work James aims in fact at debunking, among
other things, any neat divide between the logical and the evocative,
between philosophical reasoning and literary inspiration.12 Despite its
sparse success, this interpretation has been recently voiced by Hilary
Putnam, who suggests reading “Moral Philosopher” as an imaginative
journey between various moral possibilities, of which James would
describe the peculiar shortcomings and pitfalls, so to assess “the status
of moral philosophy.” On this reading, Putnam pictures the Jamesian
understanding of philosophy directly in line with that of Dewey:
as a reconstructive activity, an activity that aims at making a differ-

ence to the way we understand and the way we live our scientific,
aesthetic, educational, religious, and political views, one comprehen-
sive and durable enough to deserve the name of a reconstruction.
(Putnam 2004: 31)
Being a reconstructive activity, philosophy, understood in the way James

(and Dewey) practiced it, far from aiming at directing our thoughts and
governing our conducts, is rather meant at making us mindful of the
assumptions informing our ordinary and intellectual practices, ethics

being one among them.
According to this framework, the task of the moral philosopher would
thus change dramatically. In “Moral Philosopher,” Putnam argues, James
debates the very statute of moral philosophy as a reconstructive activity
precisely in this transformative and edifying sense. According to Putnam
we can find in the essay multiple dimensions of analysis (a blend of
normative, descriptive and clarificatory considerations), through which
James would challenge our ordinary sensibility in respect to various
moral scenarios. Once again, the literary style of “Moral Philosopher”
is remarked, and an internal connection drawn between this apparently
superfluous feature and the aims of the essay. Putnam notices in fact
how:
The writing in “The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life” is, as
James’s writing always is, highly “literary.” James takes us along
with him on a mental journey, a musing, in the course of which
a number of twists and turns take place. At the end of the journey,
we have to see that James is telling us that the moral philosopher
with which he started will come up empty-handed—or come up
with nothing but “the abstractest and vaguest features” of morality.
(Putnam 2004: 38–9)
This way of proceeding is then revealing of the method and aims of the
essay, which according to Putnam is no the defense of a substantive and
impartial moral theory. On this point he comments that:
The price of ethical treatises that really treat the moral life is the will-
ingness to take a stand that does not pretend to the total impartiality
that led to the seeming paradox that moral philosophy is required
to produce a whole moral world practically ex nihilo. In this James is
being true to his perpetual insistence on the agent point of view as
the only one ultimately available to us, as well as to his pragmatic
insistence that the standards by which inquiry is conducted them-
selves emerge from the give and take, the conflict of ideals and points
of view, and cannot be laid down beforehand. (Putnam 2004: 39)
According to Putnam the essay should be read in a dynamic and interac-

tive way, adventuring in an imaginative journey in which challenging
one’s own philosophical assumptions regarding the very aims of moral
philosophy. In this context Putnam reads the dialectic of “Moral
Philosopher” as a progressive questioning of the desiderata of moral

philosophy understood as the governance of “abstract rules” pretending
“total impartiality” on the moral life as against the adoption of the
“agent point of view” as the only available standpoint to address its
difficulties.
This is a very elegant and nuanced interpretation, and it is a pity that
Putnam did not elaborate on such insight, preferring to develop other
lines, which go in a slightly different direction than the one stressing
the transformative intent of the essay I am interested in. Putnam gives
more weight to James’s alleged solutions to the intolerable constraints
that moral theorizing would impose on the moral life, criticizing and
engaging them as positive views themselves, while I am more resolute in
the reading of those passages – on which Putnam largely draws as well –
where James exhorts us (as moral philosophers as well as individuals
reflectively engaged in our moral life) to keep an open and critical stance
over the moral positions we claim to live by. In fact, while for Putnam
in the essay a residuum of substantive ethical theorizing is still detect-
able – as when, for example, he states that in the central sections of the
essay James “begins to develop his own moral views” (Putnam 2004:
36) about moral normativity and moral obligations, or about the very
place of truth in ethics – I read James’s reflections as exploring the posi-
tions discussed as critical possibilities, which are interesting to question
and investigate (both their advantages and their shortcomings) from an
irreducibly personal, and constantly re-negotiated, point of view.
If it would be wrong to claim that in “Moral Philosopher” James
expressed no moral opinion, and thus read the text as a mere exercise in
conceptual analysis of virtual possibilities, it is important to characterize
which kinds of view James positively advanced, and most importantly
how he was arguing for them. Far from trying to convince us to adopt
a moral position over another, as a moral theorist would do, according
to my reading the essay presents us with various possibilities of the
way in which we can characterize our understanding of moral princi-
ples and norms, showing us in particular the danger of portraying them
as established outside our ordinary moral practices. James would thus
encourage us to question and check our patterns of moral thinking, as
well as their grounds, in order to enlighten our conduct (that is, the way
of conducting ourselves).
This transformative dimension challenges us to interrogate ourselves
about the kind of reading and reception that such a text requires from us,
and thus how we should react to this innovative way of understanding
the nature and stakes of a reflective investigation of the moral life. In
order to fully appreciate the dialectic of “Moral Philosopher” we should

thus be mindful of these methodological instructions, and track in the
text those formulations that directly recall such a dimension. It is only
in this way that we can appreciate the stakes of James’s ethical project as
well as his most positive moral outlook, which has a hortatory character
in this transformative acceptation.
James had thus a precise moral agenda,13 but I am claiming that we
can neither understand the motifs informing it nor appreciate its origi-
nality if we do not drop our prescriptive expectations featuring the inter-
pretative habit of looking to his texts for a moral theory. James would
be interested, as a moral philosopher, in unmasking certain deceiving
and dangerous pictures of ethics that we project on our moral life in
order to address their difficulties, which often represents the foremost
impediment for their flourishing. In “Moral Philosopher” he presents
a contrast between ethics understood as the advancement of moral
theories and as the attention to the difficulties of the moral life often
caused by such projections. This contrast can be redescribed as between
a foundational and a therapeutic conception of philosophical activity,
and thus of ethical critique.
For James the difficulties clouding the field of our possibilities of
expression in ethics are rooted in a human tendency to represent the
validity and the normativity of our judgment and principles as inde-
pendent from the exercise of our situated moral sensibility. The refuta-
tion of both an absolute point of view, which would ground our moral
practices, and a view from nowhere, external to such practices, from
which to account for them is explored in “Moral Philosopher” as the
attack to the conception of moral philosophy as the advancement of
moral theories, which James depicts as deleterious yet not compulsive
strives to secure an absolute standpoint from which repairing our moral
practices from their contingencies and tentativeness.
According to James the difficulties which we encounter when we
portray moral values and principles as independent from the exercise
of our sensibilities can be overcome through an adjustment of the way
in which we picture how such values and principles inform our moral
life in the first place. The point of moral philosophy would thus be to
manifest and discard the intellectual tendencies to expunge our personal
contribution to our ordinary moral practices, so to free our moral life
from the alienation to which it is subjected when we think otherwise.
James is here denouncing a certain dialectic internal to our human
condition as practical beings (that is, our tendency and temptation to
avoid taking responsibility for our thoughts and conduct), claiming that
what philosophy should do is make us aware of such a dialectic and not

force a resolution by means of a prescriptive theory, regardless of what
the subjects involved think and feel about it. This is in fact what moral
philosophers used to do by laying down prescriptive requirements on
our moral life, and what James denounced as a most dangerous (self-)
description of such reflective inquiry.
According to James, when we describe the validity of a moral judg-
ment or principle by making reference to an abstract order that would
ground them, then we are alienating our expressive capacities to an
abstract dimension of value in which personal contribution is neither
needed nor welcomed. This assumption prevents us from appreciating
the essentially perspectival source of our attributions of value, since it
describes our capacity to make moral distinctions and take moral deci-
sions as deriving from a superior axiological dimension in which such
distinctions and decisions are grounded, rather than as the genuine
expression of our point of view on things. The aim of moral reflec-
tion, practiced in a hortatory tone, is to get rid of these tendencies and
assumptions, and the companion foundational anxieties according to
which the moral life is exemplified in the capacity (or failure) to respect
the moral principles imposed on us from the outside. By claiming that
we must change our very attitude or stance toward the complexities
of the moral life, in which moral principles and norms have a central
place when pictured as constitutive aspects of its development, James
re-orients the whole purpose of moral reflection, shifting the center of
interest from moral theory to the self’s relationship with morality itself.
In “Moral Philosopher” James labels the condition in which we often
find ourselves as a “superstitional state,” characterizing it as that passive
stance we often take on our own moral practices. James claims that the
conceptual resources to escape such a state should be found in our moral
phenomenology, which we tend to disregard in favor of a prescriptive
theory on which we project substantive philosophical requirements. The
goal of philosophical reflection would thus be that of showing an alter-
native, often before our eyes and yet rarely appreciated, which strips the
superstitional view from its allure and grip. When in this state of super-
stition, human beings refuse to see their moral conduct as grounded in
the active exercise of their sensibility and will, and thus alienate their
own expressive capacities from the existence of a system of values and
norms that are established without their personal involvement and
contribution.
Philosophical reflection should account for this temptation at the
reflective level, showing the ways in which this temptation pervades
our ordinary practices of judgment and action alike, hindering us from

appreciating the personal dimension of the principles we live by. Against
these tendencies, James encourages us to take a more imaginative stance
over our moral practices and so to begin seeing them as the expression
of our subjectivity rather than an external constraint.
James’s pragmatism understood as a philosophical method aims at
unmasking such dynamics, which pervade our lives. The diagnosis
advanced in “Moral Philosopher” is thus directed at the erosion of such
tendencies, which tend to stiffen the meaning of our ordinary prac-
tices. The moral dimension of this inquiry should thus be reallocated
on this double register of the loss/recovery of expressive capacities, and
of a critique of ethics understood as the advancement of moral theo-
ries which are often the very sources of such instability. The secondary
literature has been mostly deaf to this central feature of James’s ethics,
deflecting the goals and preoccupations which move this radical
approach to moral thought.
The structure of the essay and its dialectics
For an adequate comprehension of “Moral Philosopher,” as well as of the

misunderstandings it has generated, it would be productive to survey its
structure and style. In the proper light, the dialectic of the essay reveal
its real intentions: that is, conceptual criticism of the picture of moral
reflection that both professional philosophers and ordinary people very
often take for granted when facing ethical issues. The particular reading
of “Moral Philosopher” I am suggesting allows one to recognize such
often neglected critical register, and appreciate its nature. In the inter-
pretation I shall advance I will give prominence to the dialectic of the
essay as a pivotal element for the comprehension of its point: that is,
according to my reconstruction James asks for a distinctively engaged
reading as against a merely passive apprehension of its contents. My
reading aims at understanding what the author is stating in the text by
making reference to what he is doing as well as to what he means to
achieve through it. It is in fact only by taking seriously certain passages
voicing methodological instructions and considerations on what James
is doing in the essay that the alternative view I am interested in becomes
available.
In James’s “Moral Philosopher” such instructions and comments,
although stated clearly in the dialectic of the essay – for example, in the
beginning and at the end – can be fully appreciated only in the light of
his general conception of philosophical activity outlined in other texts.
It is thus my contention that in order to appreciate the kind of work that

James proposes in “Moral Philosopher” we should first understand and
practise the philosophical inquiry I sketched in the previous chapter,
paying particular attention to the peculiar form which the capacity (or
failure) to respect the moral principles imposed on us from the outside
takes in the moral case.
Except in a few cases, commentators haven’t paid the necessary atten-
tion to the dialectics of the essay, taking each paragraph and formula-
tion independently from the wider picture and ignoring altogether the
methodological instructions and comments in the text. In particular,
these commentators have been almost indifferent to the methodolog-
ical statements in the text, in which James explores the framework of his
conception. When appreciated, such instructions have been minimized
or inadequately characterized.
In this way, while a lot of emphasis has been given to his alleged “prin-
ciple of preferences maximization,” or to the identification between the
existence of goods and demands, no adequate attention has been paid
to James’s exhortation to rethink the way in which ethics should be
conducted and thus the very figure of the moral philosopher rethought.
These methodological instructions do not function as practical prescrip-
tive precepts, and yet they represent the key to appreciating the goals
and stakes of the essay, as well as its place in James’s moral production.
They in fact suggest to us the form that moral reflection should take
without imposing any particular condition on its content. It is precisely
because of these overlooked considerations that the reading of “Moral
Philosopher” as a lineament of a moral theory must appear as rather
unsatisfying, and its arguments contradictory, consequently attracting
the critiques that have been advanced since its first appearance.
In the essay James aims at revealing the difficulties and dangers of
conceiving ethics as a dogmatic guide to all aspects of our interiority and
conduct, regardless of the ways in which our moral claims and views are
endorsed and lived by. This analysis aims at liberating us from the temp-
tation to represent moral reflection as the imposition of philosophical
requirements on the moral life from the above. “Moral Philosopher”
discloses an alternative picture of moral thought as something that we
can inhabit because it moves at the level of our ordinary moral practice.
According to such a reading, James would not have been interested in
convincing us of any particular moral code or in imposing a specific
moral agenda; rather, he aimed at showing the form that moral reflec-
tion should take in order to address the difficulties of our moral life,
often generated by such rejected attempts.
Moral reflection, according to James, should in fact aid us in appre-

ciating the various ways in which we are touched by situations that
prompt our sensibility to respond in ways which are expressive of our
interested and concerned point of view. In “Moral Philosopher” James
explores a number of cases in which such a capacity is alienated: that
is, when we seem to be unable to represent those situations that we face
as occasions positively triggering our evaluative capacities to adjudicate
them – a theme that James will reprise from different angles in a number
of other writings. In the essay James in fact presents some aspects of our
moral life, variously addressed by the central ethical questions, with the
goal of showing how a distorted view of our moral psychology, ontology,
and epistemology – that is, of the way in which we portray the ways in
which we arrive at moral distinctions and formulate moral judgments in
our practices – hinders us to productively address the difficulties charac-
terizing each because of its foundational assumptions.
According to James, if moral reflection aspires to have a genuine grasp
on the moral life, it should rethink its very philosophical credentials
and question the relationship that it should entertain with the variety of
moral thoughts and experiences articulating our moral phenomenology.
Moral reflection should thus resolutely abandon its foundational preten-
sions (both aprioristic and metaphysical), and operate instead at the
nitty-gritty level of our ordinary moral practice. This pragmatic move is
an invitation to question the assumptions on which our moral convic-
tions lie, and is an exhortation to free ourselves from the subjection to
the dictates of a moral theory that imposes on our moral life with its
own dictates (of precision, of definitiveness, of impartiality). According
to James we should re-appropriate the capacity of perceiving the moral
conceptions we live by as instruments allowing us to establish mean-
ingful and productive relations with ourselves and the world: moral
conceptions that are expressive of our personal point of view rather than
impediments to its flourishing. It is in this sense that every (moral) idea
is a hypothesis we test in experience and which currency is constantly
checked against the larger background of our reactions and attitudes – a
background which can itself get transformed by previously overlooked
or untested ideas.
The very title of the essay gives us a first clue of the anti-foundational
message James is interested in conveying, or at least it points us in that
direction. As Patrick Dooley (1974: 76) tells us, the original title consid-
ered by James was “The Essentials of an Ethical Universe”, a title that he
changed minutes before the conference to the one by which it is now
known. The original title, despite suggesting the tone and stakes of the
essay in ways not dissimilar to the definitive one, was potentially decep-
tive. In fact, from such a title the reader could have understandably
expected an exposition of the metaphysics of morals: that is, a treatment
of the properties and features constituting what in the essay James calls
“a genuine universe from the ethical point of view.” Although James’s
use of the latter expression is a rather distinctive (and almost technical)
one that has nothing to do with an ontology and semantics of moral
facts understood as an exercise in speculative philosophy into the fabric
of moral properties and the best distribution of goods as the expression
itself might suggest, the ambiguity of the original title is resolved by the
adoption of the definitive one.
As its very title is a brilliant application of Ockham’s razor, the essay
investigates a methodological issue rather than a substantive one, in
the belief that what we most need is a radical reconsideration of the
relationship between the moral philosopher and the moral life along
non-foundational lines. The very topic of the essay would thus not be
the defense of a particular ethical position, but rather the problematiza-
tion of what we do when we, as philosophers, (think we should) dispense one.
Those interpretations that read in the essay a lineament of a substantive
moral view, variously denouncing either its inconsistencies or its bril-
liance, seems thus to be lacking their referent from the very beginning.
If we move to the second paragraph, leaving the first one to the side
for a moment, we shall find another very interesting instruction on
how to read the essay and its dialectics. James here investigates the
“position of him who seek an ethical philosophy” (my italics), that is
the “would-be philosopher.” To investigate the position of such person
is clearly a very different task than that of surveying her particular views,
although the two tasks are connected in the measure in which qua
human beings moral philosophers have personal moral views, as well
as opinions on their own intellectual activity – views impinging on the
latter and at the same time being transformed by them. This intertwine-
ment is what generates for James all sorts of trouble, both at the reflec-
tive and ordinary levels – though some of them are productive ones.
James claims that the initial condition and role of the moral philoso-
pher the way he understands it and will be considering it in the essay is
not that of defending a particular set of values or principles, but rather:
To find an account of the moral relations that obtains among things,

which will weave them into the unity of a stable system, and make
of the world what one may call a genuine universe from the ethical
point of view. (141)14
As the context clarifies, the reference to a “genuine universe from the

ethical point of view” does not refer to the philosopher’s own views on
the moral constituents of reality, as by such a turn of phrase James is
rather referring to its intentions when she enters moral reflection in
the first place: that is, accounting for such complexity and frame such
understanding in a consistent framework. The drive to systematicity
is thus brought up at the outset, and presented by James as a central
feature of the very commitment to the practice of philosophical ethics.
Whether such a feature should be encouraged, resisted, or amended, lies
at the heart of the project of the essay to assess.
The figure of the moral philosopher appears several times in the text,
and plays a key role in its dialectics. Her first meaningful occurrence
is in the context of James’s quick but pivotal considerations on moral
skepticism. James claims that “moral skeptic” is not a morally acceptable
position at a reflective level, as it embodies the very negation of (the task
and point of) ethical inquiry. In fact, by negating the very possibility
of giving a reflective account of the moral life, the moral skeptic shuns
participation in moral discussion altogether. James writes:
So far from ethical skepticism being one possible fruit of ethical

philosophizing, it can only be regarded as that residual alternative
to all philosophy which from the outset menaces every would-be
philosopher’s who may give up the quest discouraged, and renounce
his original claim. (141)
Although James will characterize in more depth this provisionary

description of the moral philosopher and her ambitions in due course,
I am interested here in remarking the connection of this view with the
theme of skepticism. The contrast with the figure of the moral skeptic
gives us some indications on the path that James aims at covering in the
essay. In this passage James tells us that the appreciation of a complex
and unstable moral life is a necessary condition for moral thinking, and
thus moral skepticism is not an option that he is interested in discussing
in the essay. The moral skeptic in fact evades her responsibilities to her
community by having no reflective commitment, and her attitude is
opposed to that of the moral philosopher who is not discouraged by
the difficulties that the pluralism of values, opinions, and sensibilities
brings into moral inquiry. The latter will in fact not sidestep the task of
harmonizing the diverse pushes and tensions characterizing the moral
life: James presents this stance as antithetic to that of the skeptic, who
refuses from the very beginning to stand the challenge. Philosophy, as
an alternative to skepticism – itself a possibility we’re always threatened

with when giving up reflective thinking – acquires the traits of a strategic
resistance of authoritarian drift of all kinds – absolutism and nihilism
being the two opposites of the same anti-reflective spectrum.
It is in this anti-skeptical sense that, according to James, the moral
philosopher aims at making of the world a genuine universe from an
ethical point of view: that is, a universe in its fullest richness of moral
points of view, relating and clashing with each other. As James keeps
saying, the philosopher’s subject matter is “the ideals that he finds
existing in the world,” and not some alleged moral order, already estab-
lished according to which organizing such ideals and sorting them out
independently from the way they are experienced and expressed by
those giving them currency in the first place. Surely, moral philosophers
want to give those ideals some order. But, as we keep reading, James
cautions right away that, when this ideal of the moral philosopher,
“whose legitimate presence must never be overlooked,” interferes with
the particular preferences and choices of the individual involved in the
moral life under scrutiny by championing any of them over the others,
or worse slashing them altogether in name of an abstract order, then the
moral philosopher regrettably becomes a moralist and partisan.
While James thus grants full reflective dignity and usefulness to the
philosopher’s ideal, which he opposes to the dangerous attitude of the
ethical skeptic, he warns us away from some particularly unwelcome
directions such a project might take. In James’s words:
Were he interested peculiarly in the triumph of an one kind of good,

he would pro tanto cease to be a judicial investigator, and become an
advocate for some limited element of the case. (142)
In “Moral Philosopher” James is interested in investigating the shape

that moral reflection (the moral philosopher) should take if it wants
to address most profitably the complexity of the moral life, cautioning
(us) against those approaches which tries to impose any order to the
values circulating in the ethical universe in name of some alleged higher
moral order. James fiercely opposed those approaches that understood
philosophical reflection as the imposition of a certain configuration of
values and principles (whatever their nature) on reality, imprisoning in
this way our moral life in the tangles of a moral theory governing its
possibilities from the above of their effectiveness and contingency. The
moral philosopher should thus not be a skeptic, but neither should she
be a moralist, who dogmatically erects her theoretical system as part
of a canon of ethical meaningfulness and intelligibility. As a “judicial

investigator,” the moral philosopher should, on the contrary, observe
the values and ideals, both possible and in current circulation, and inter-
rogate the very context and practices of the moral life in which they are
articulated in order to inform that life in its difficulties.
The moral philosopher, far from imposing her own creed by means of
a morality system allegedly governing the moral life from the above of
its contingency with a goal in mind of reducing it in the form of a unity,
should rather follow the irregular line traced by the unfolding of our
moral lives in their particular paths. The ideals of the moral philosopher
and those of the moral life should be kept in contrastive tension, since
the desiderata of the former might endanger the very existence of the
latter by violating the tentative nature of the experiences and concep-
tions articulating the diverse aspects of the moral life.
In the essay James thus investigates the kind of work that the moral
philosopher should undertake in order to minimize the risks of jeopard-
izing the unfolding of a rich and genuine moral life made of consisten-
cies as well as of contrasts, and of personal attempts to come to grip with
both. According to the therapeutic interpretation that I am sketching,
this instruction should be read in the dialectic of the central sections
of the essay introduced by these considerations on the task and threats
of the moral philosopher. In these sections James presents three central
aspects of the moral discourse, and debates the limits and difficulties of
a philosophical account of the respective experiential and conceptual
fields. James claims:
There are three questions in ethics which must be kept apart. Let
them be called respectively the psychological question, the metaphys-
ical question and the casuistic question. The psychological question
asks after the historical origin of our moral ideas and judgments;
the metaphysical question asks what the very meaning of the words
“good,” “ill,” and “obligation” are; the casuistic question asks what
is the measure of the various goods and ills which men recognize,
so that the philosopher may settle the true order of human obliga-
tions. (142)
Most of the literature understands these three parts as presenting respec-

tively James’s moral psychology, semantics and normative ethics. I will
take care of such substantive interpretations later. What interests me at
this stage is rather taking issue with those authors who instead read in
this portion of text a sharp and unbridgeable contraposition between
moral philosophy and the moral life, according to which there would
be an incommensurable gap between their respective strategies and
goals. According to these readings, which I shall label as “skeptical,”
after James’s own usage of the expression, far from advancing his various
moral views, in these sections James intends to show the impossibility
of dialogue between the two. Conversely, according to my reconstruc-
tion, such sections explore from different angles our very relationship,
as moral philosophers, with the moral life.
That the interpretative problem is a genuine one is clear from a
number of remarks by James that we find disseminated in various texts
in which he voices his suspicion of the very possibility of such dialogue.
One statement of the issue can be found for example in PP, where James
states that:
Life is one long struggle between conclusions based on abstract ways

of conceiving cases, and opposite conclusions prompted by our
instinctive perception of them as individual facts. (PP: 1266)
The key to solving the puzzle lies in understanding the nature and
purport of such “struggle” over abstractness and individuality: if it is
internal to moral reflection or rather external to it. Let me articulate the
particular solution that I envision in James by surveying a sample of the
literature addressing similar issues.
John Campbell elaborated the contrast between moral philosophy and
moral life in a direction that is highly instructive. In a path-breaking
article on James’s ethics, Campbell investigated what he labels the “moral
tone,” often recognized but seldom explored at proper depth, of James’s
philosophical thought. The edifying dimension of James’s approach
to ethics is presented by Campbell through the idea of personal fulfill-
ment, which James would have explored in the contrast between the
almost intimate search for meaning and values, and the restrictions and
shallowness of the second-hand principles allegedly expressing them.
Campbell writes that, according to James:
To set up any firm guideline in advance would force all action, to be

moral, into a predetermined mold. James remarked that this latter
view was a deadening position of those who maintain that “there
must be one system that is right and every wrong.” The inadequacy of
this monism was clear to James; and he felt that is was because of this
narrow approach that we have had the endless conflicts over which
is the sole “right” moral principle. (Campbell 1981: 225)
What I would like to underscore in this passage is the important connec-

tion envisioned by the author between the establishment of ethical
systems (often generating conflicts within the moral life) and the dead-
ening of moral values and ideals. Campbell is right on target when he
detects this dialectic between the meaningfulness/growth/pluralism of
the moral life and the narrowness/deadening/monism of moral theory
featuring James’s approach to the issue of the encounter of moral reflec-
tion with the moral life. This theme informs the central sections of
“Moral Philosopher,” but its presence is also appreciable in other writ-
ings. Campbell reads James’s injunctions to explore one’s possibilities of
action as the only possible answer to those situations that seems to call
for a moral resolution. Theories and principles are not what we should
be looking for, since according to James it is only by doing good that we
suddenly create it, whether such conduct makes reference to any justi-
ficatory system other than (and external to) such doings themselves.
This is a particularly heated and debated point of James’s moral thought
because of the multi-layered meaning of this philosophical move. Here
there are in fact at play at least two orders of issues that it would be
useful to disentangle.
As Campbell notes, in encouraging the practical advancement of
one’s personal creeds and deeds without making reference to received
values and principles, James aims to grant full philosophical dignity
and significance to each individual outlook in the midst of its prac-
tical deliberation. Campbell understands the central sections of “Moral
Philosopher” – and in particular the two on metaphysical and casuistic
questions – to be precisely vindicating this idea. Besides this claim there
is also at play a metaphilosophical point about the very feasibility of
moral reflection, which Campbell rightly labels as a “reformist aspect”
of James’s moral philosophy, explored in terms of the contrast between
the possibility of living genuine moral lives and the constant thread of
deadening them by placing them in a context of external regulation and
granting them full ethical validity. Campbell sees no resources in James’s
text for a strategy to avoid this clash, and comments that, though the
stress on self-fulfilment has fine resources for accounting the richness
and plurality of our moral life, by “placing little emphasis on criticism
and evaluation” such an approach still cuts itself off altogether from
the possibility of opening up to the reflective and critical requirements
of moral understanding. The divide between moral reflection and the
moral life would thus seem sharp and hardly reconcilable, if not at
considerable costs for the latter, with the gulf between them slashing
the appeal of both by making them look like missing some important
ingredient (either the expressivity or the reflexivity) that their produc-

tive dialogue might bring about.
A similar concern is shared by Graham Bird, who claims along similar
lines that, in the moral discourse (as well as in the religious one), James
draws a “fundamental distinction between our experiences and the
theoretical accounts we subsequently give of them” (Bird 1986: 144).
According to Bird, for James we should be happy to stick to an “undis-
torted description” of such experiences, eyeing a “science based on ordi-
nary reports of those experiences and beliefs.” Any attempt made by
philosophers to reduce or even organize “the chaos of moral opinion to
some unitary formula” is in fact, according to James, futile and doomed
to fail. Bird, after a quick (and covertly negative) discussion of some of
the ideas set forth in the central sections of “Moral Philosopher,” claims
that the difficulties which James as a moral philosopher encounters in
his task:
Indicate not the impossibility so much as the futility of formulating

moral principles. His main task is to clarify the nature and basis of
moral values, but he wants also to contrast the philosopher’s search
for a rationalist test with the practical decision procedures which
are in fact employed. The test, according to James, is simply that of
historical success. (Bird 1986: 156)
The rupture here is neat, and apparently hardly reconcilable, and yet
Bird notices how James opens to a feeble possibility of dialogue by
restoring some respectability to philosophical reflection on ethics. Bird
writes that:
James acknowledges that philosophers may contribute to moral deci-

sions by clarifying the issues, and even constructing ideal moral worlds
to guide us in revising current views. But such ideal intellectualistic
constructions lose importance and practical value when contrasted
with the practical decision of social and moral life. (Bird 1986: 156,
emphasis mine)
Bird reads James as crediting moral reflection with some constructive

capacity in its clarifying role, but he then strips this most promising
insight of most of its value by adding that a viable way of fulfilling
this role might be found in the construction of “ideal moral worlds,”
supposedly acting as guides for our moral views. In fact, by depicting the
aim of the moral philosopher as that of building such intellectual ideal
constructions Bird ipso facto re-states the harsh contraposition between

the ideal of moral reflection and the tentativeness and chaotic profile of
the moral life, against which the former “loses importance and practical
value.”
Franzese defended most articulately the thesis of a sharp contraposi-
tion between moral philosophy and the moral life, and reads the central
parts of “Moral Philosopher” as an attack on the prescriptive conception
of ethics dominating James’s times. According to Franzese, in the essay
James investigated the role and attitude of the moral philosopher in
search of prescriptive ultimate principles able to “unify the moral life
into a single systematic totality;” a quest which historically took three
forms (psychological, metaphysical and casuistic), all of which failed
to meet their promises to unify the moral life in a systematic totality.
Conscious of that failure, James would have thus re-thought the very
possibility of a reflective approach to the moral life. Franzese writes that
the aim of “Moral Philosopher:”
Is not to define a system or a hierarchy of moral values or princi-

ples intended to rule individual or collective behavior, but rather to
inquire into the constitutive attitudes and activities of moral philoso-
phers in order to outline a more adequate approach to the nature and
meaning of moral experience. (Franzese 2008: 27)
Franzese breaks neatly with those who have looked at this portion of
the text with the goal of finding the specifics of James’s moral theory,
and firmly claims that the essay rather interrogates on the necessity and
possibility of a new course for ethics outside philosophical reflection alto-
gether – as the title of the relevant section of Franzese’s book suggests,
the gist of the moral life is to be appreciated in the latter’s contrast with
moral philosophy.
Despite applauding Franzese’s reconstruction for its subtle apprecia-
tion of the anti-theoretical intents of the essay, the interpretative line
I defend takes a slightly different course, precisely in its way of inter-
preting this critical register and its strategies of accomplishment. For
Franzese there is just no possible reconciliation in view between moral
philosophy and the moral life because of the “illegitimate projection
of a privileged experience over the experiential diversity of the whole
human race” (Franzese 2008: 28), constitutive of philosophical inquiry.
According to my reading the dialectic of the essay explores the possibility
of a new course in ethics within moral philosophy once such illegitimate
projections are dropped to make room for a more nuanced sensibility
and meet the desiderata of the moral life on its own grounds. For me,
this is the key to envisioning a reconciliation between the reflective and
the ordinary dimension of moral understanding and avoiding the skep-
tical position that, as we saw, James explicitly resists in the opening of
the essay.
When juxtaposing the moral philosopher with the moral life, the
contrast James is interested in highlighting is not that between the
aims of philosophy and the exigencies of the individuals involved in
or touched by philosophical inquiry – as suggested by Franzese (as well
as by Campbell and Bird), but rather between such individuals and the
(often disruptive) intellectualistic temptations assailing and seducing them
when they portray the very nature of moral reflection as performed
by moral philosophers. The difficulties of which James speaks would
thereby originate in a certain conception of moral reflection, in terms
of the advancement of moral theories which impose on the moral life
from the above of its contingencies; but, such difficulties are those that
we create by necessarily representing the task of philosophical ethics
in this way, and as such are not derived from an alleged clash between
philosophical and personal desiderata abstractly considered.
By characterizing the moral philosopher as uniquely interested in
advancing moral theories Franzese crystallizes such a figure in a fictional
entity, and describes her activity as the uniquely possible result of moral
investigations, forbidding in this way the possibility of appreciating
the therapeutic and transformative dimension of “Moral Philosopher”
which in my reading represents the very heart of the essay. Franzese
reads the essay in utterly negative terms: that is, as the demonstration
of the fundamental and unavoidable failure of philosophical ethics as a
reflective enterprise. According to my reading, James’s refutation of the
way in which ethics has been conceived and practiced gets redescribed
as an invitation to acknowledge (and possibly dispose of) our intellec-
tual temptations, which often issue in the superstition to shape our ideas
and judgments on the higher requirements of a philosophical theory
which is disrespectful of our sensibility and personal outlook. Rather
than the impossibility of an encounter between moral reflection and
moral life, in “Moral Philosopher” James would thus have thematized
the problematic character of our relationship with moral reflection itself.
If this reading has some validity, then we should not, after James, neces-
sarily discard moral theorizing, but rather critically survey its funda-
mental assumptions and principles to gain a better perspective on such
reflective activity. There would thus be a space of opening, in James, to
further moral reflection on moral theorizing as an ethical activity that
we might perform in a variety of ways – critically as well as uncritically –

thus determining such reflection’s very value and advantage.
This interpretative difference resonates in the central sections of the
essay. Far from showing the difficulty of the respective psychological,
metaphysical and casuistic foundations of morality, as Franzese claims,
James investigates the internal difficulties of the various aspects and
functions (psychological, metaphysical and casuistic) of the moral life
when we project intellectualistic requirements on them. Through the
analysis of the various dimensions of our moral phenomenology James
wants to neutralize the intellectualizing temptation into which we often
fall when we portray a distorted picture of the philosophical require-
ments of moral reflection. The role of the moral philosopher is thus at
once descriptive and exhortative: she should account at a reflective level
for this temptation, showing the ways in which it insinuates into our
practices of moral judgment and conduct, blinding us from the appre-
ciation of the personal dimension of the principles and rules we live
by; she should set us free from the joke of such temptation by inviting
us to abandon the companion conviction that ethics should consist in
the elaboration of moral principles and rules imposed on the moral life
disregarding of our availability to accept and endorse them.
Hortatory ethics and moral conceptions
The individuation of this alternative non-foundational relationship

between moral reflection and the moral life calls for a characterization
of its details. While an explicit list of features or a concise definition of
such exhortative register is lacking, still we find disseminated in James’s
work various clues giving it context and shape. James elaborates at some
length on the nature of the exhortative register informing such a rela-
tionship in the introductory chapter of TT, a book that originated from
a cycle of conferences on psychology to teachers and instructors that
took place at Harvard. James’s lectures spanned the art of teaching to the
latest physiological “discoveries.” It is very interesting to note the blend
of pedagogical and philosophical considerations that he covered. In this
context James writes:
The science of logic never made a man reason rightly, and the science
of ethics (if there be such a thing) never made a man behave rightly.
The most such sciences can do is to help us to catch ourselves up and
check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to criti-
cise ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes. (TT: 15)
The importance of this characterization of ethics for the understanding

of James’s moral thought has often been overlooked. James wishes a text
of moral philosophy to be exhortative more than prescriptive: it should
in fact convey both the depth and triviality of our moral experience and
conduct in practice. According to James the relationship between moral
reflection and moral life should not be a foundational one, since the
task of a “science of ethics,” far from prescribing which course of action
to engage in or indicating how to behave rightly, is instead critical and
therapeutic – to “catch ourselves up and check ourselves,” offering artic-
ulated criticism of what we practically think and do. We do not follow
moral reflection in order to (know how to) behave rightly, but rather we
pay attention and listen to it in order to understand what might have
gone wrong had we behaved in a certain way. Moral reflection should
in fact be critically directive without being positively moralistic. James
continues:
A science only lays down lines within which the rules of the art
must fall, laws which the follower of the art must not transgress; but
what particular thing he shall do positively within those lines is left
exclusively to his own genius. One genius will do his work well and
succeed in one way, while another succeeds as well quite differently;
yet neither will transgress the lines. (TT: 15)
As James specifies in this second quotation, by contrasting a legalistic

terminology with an artistic one, the instructions of moral reflection
should not be read as specific prescriptions in respect of what should be
positively done, but rather as indications of a certain personal situation
in which we can find ourselves, internal to a certain art in which what is
at stake is the exercise of our individual sensibility is at stake.
Moral reflection should prompt us to interrogate the very founda-
tions and presuppositions of our moral practices, offering a perspicuous
presentation of the ways and conditions through which we arrive at
accepting or refuting them, and thus acknowledging their capacity to
give expression to our subjectivity or rather to alienate it. According to
James, when doing moral philosophy we should be doing something
different than offering moral directives in the form of theories: we
should try to make sense of the practices that articulate our value judg-
ments and attribution of moral significance, being mindful and critical
of the directions that such practices might take. In the ethical domain it
is our subjectivity that is at play, and moral reflection can at most “criti-
cize more articulately” without however pretending to prescribe which
thoughts to have and which conducts to take. Ethics should be exhor-

tative in the measure in which it suggests ways – and offers us instru-
ments – through which we might ponder (and in certain cases radically
rethink) the relationship between moral philosophy and the moral life.
There is a deeper and more general methodological point underlying
this way of understanding the contrast between prescriptions and the
wide range of descriptions and invitations that James indicates as appro-
priate for a philosophical inquiry of the moral life – and more gener-
ally as a proper method for philosophical inquiry tout court. This has
to do with James’s troubled relationship with theories (philosophical
as well as scientific), and their professed foundational character and
prescriptive ambitions – if not an in-built feature of theirs, surely a
widespread understanding of them. James was generally suspicious of
theories because of their tendency to force the varieties of experience
into a single and often misleading category. On more than one occa-
sion he noticed and remarked “the contrast between the richness of life
and the poverty of all possible formulas” (ECR: 489). Very rarely in fact
James used the vocabulary of theories to describe what he was doing and
claimed to achieve, even where the highest pitches of his emphatic tone
would suggest the contrary. His use of other terms in spite of theory –
for example “conception,” “temperament,” “attitude,” “orientation,” or
“Weltanshauung,” just to name a few – underlies in fact a deep philo-
sophical motivation, indicating a demarcation between a foundational
as opposed to a therapeutic-exhortative conception of reflective activity
and critique.
By welcoming a therapeutic-exhortative approach to our philosoph-
ical and moral investigations, James points to the problematic character
of theories when they pretend to regulate the concepts and experi-
ences articulating our philosophical and moral practices from the above
of their actual exercise in the name of prescriptive systematic aspira-
tions. James thus marks a difference between theories and conceptions,
defining the latter as those attitudes, orientation and world-view that, in
a more or less refined form, each of us uses to deal with oneself and the
world. While theories pick out phenomena according to fixed, explan-
atory criteria aiming at carving nature at its joints – theories, in this
sense, deal with the individuation and regulation of the various entities
of reality – in the case of conceptions it is the subjects themselves who
are called for an ongoing renegotiation of the criteria of appropriateness
of phenomena depending on the capacity of such criteria to express the
very perspective of the subjects generating – conceptions in this sense
expresses our ways of dealing with reality.
It is noteworthy that, for James, the very same dialectics between theo-
ries and conceptions is in place for what regards the scientific discourse
as well. Scientific results can in fact be understood as theories of rather
as conceptions: science as an intellectual activity and practice produces
predictions, categorization, and explanations of reality in the form of
(more or less exhaustive) theories or by offering conjectures, pictures,
and descriptions of reality in the form of (more or less refined) concep-
tions. James, as in the case of the philosophical discourse – and in some
ways this choice contributes to dangerously, although interestingly, blur
the lines between the two – preferred conceptions over theories. This
would explain for example James’s reservations about evolution as a
theory: James regarded highly Darwin (who acted as an early intellectual
guide) and the latter’s revolutionary mindset. But James was critical of
evolution as a theory, while applauding it as a conception – an investi-
gative tool, or a “mood of contemplation, an emotional attitude” (WB:
188). If understood as a grand theory about the origin, development,
and regulation of the life of human beings the evolutionary hypothesis
is as dogmatic and objectionable as its rival creationism. However, if
read as a way of looking at certain phenomena in a novel way Darwin’s
theory might well contribute to the comprehension of such human facts
and tell us something important in respect to our way of facing and
living them.15
According to James both theories and conceptions are devices of our
own making, that we put to work in order to try to understand reality
and possibly sort it out in congenial ways – although theories are often
driven by the opposite belief of representing reality faithfully and carving
nature at just its proper joints, independently of any human interest and
concern. The difference between theories and conceptions can thus be
outlined in terms of their different acknowledgments – or lack thereof –
of our selective and provisional takes on reality: while theories are the
result of a choice which is often motivated by a desire to find a general
and to find a definite and generalizable key to explain, and thus rule,
the complexities of reality, conceptions are the direct expression of our
way of seeing things and our concomitant conduct. According to James
only the latter has the necessary complexity to relate to reality without
mortifying or deadening reality’s fullness and density: our conceptions
indicate our entire perspective on things, celebrating the “maybes” and
the “ever not quite,” while instead theories tend to suffocate this variety
of moods by imposing on experience a certain univocal and unitary
form. While theories specify a metaphysics (telling us what there is, thus
generating privileged inventories of reality), conceptions express an
attitude (suggesting a way of thinking, which has certain consequences

on the way we look at things). Theories individuate fixities or at most
regularities, while conceptions are intimately related with practices and
possibilities of thought and conduct.
For James what is interesting and worthwhile in our reflective stance
toward reality are not their claims of exhaustiveness or their prescrip-
tive promises, but rather the ways in which they make available
distinctive experiences and further thoughts, which is precisely where
according to James conceptions do better than theories as per their lack
of prescriptive pretensions. In his writings James is constantly inviting
his readers to be mindful and pay attention to the ways in which theo-
ries can be subtractive devices obscuring (rather than exalting) the
radical complexity, variety, and unique character of the facts and situ-
ations of life. It may be well apparent that conceptions can be narrow-
minded and authoritative, while theories can be liberating – and even
celebrate chances and possibilities. Nevertheless, James’s general point
in distinguishing the two is that: in theorizing about a phenomenon
one assumes a detached and disengaged stance; in bringing forth a
conception one is committed and engaged. And this is a difference that
matters for James as it stresses the various uses one can make of both
theories and conceptions over their respective contents. There is in fact
an important sense in which for James the “how” and the “then” are
more important than the “what” and the “why:” what matters the most
in Jamesian pragmatism is what we do with phenomena – whether we
try to regulate and rule them from some theory, or rather engage with
them in order to experiment with and improve them. We crave genuine
understanding as much detached from any subjective bias, but might
well end up with nothing but a sheer intellectual fétiche, of little use to
our lives.
According to James, the tendency of the “theorizing mind ... to the
over-simplification of its materials” (VRE: 30) is subtle and widespread,
and should thus be carefully handled. James’s difficult mission is, as he
famously stated in a letter to Mss Morse, to “defend (against all the prej-
udices of my ‘class’) ‘experience’ against ‘philosophy’” (C9: 186), where
philosophy is here depicted as that activity of thought disrespectful of
experience, shrinking and dehumanizing it in the name of what the
intellectual tribe deems as higher and more refined. This admonition
comes in many forms, informing much of what James strived to accom-
plish and exhibit in (and through) his writings, the quarrel against intel-
lectualism being his signature fight. In an early essay titled “On Some
Hegelism,” in the context of assessing “the motives and difficulties of
philosophizing in general” – a prelude to a harsh critique of Hegel’s

system – James reinforces this point by claiming how:
In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our formulas lies a

standing temptation at certain times to give up trying to say anything
adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling words
which but confess our impotence before their ineffability. (WB: 204)
James tells us how the language of theories, of “our formulas,” is often

inadequate to account for the facts of life, denouncing the “standing
temptation” to give up considering those facts in their own terms, and
to take refuge instead in words which, incapable to capture such a
variety, end up alienating its very possibilities. There would be in fact,
according to James, a internal resistance of fact to theories, and in the
moral domain, in which the personal dimension of the relevant expe-
riences is particularly pronounced – and in which what is at stake is
precisely the individual acknowledgement of one’s thoughts and
conducts – this resistance turns into a sheer intolerance. Rather than
seeking any external foundation for our moral evaluations in principles
and dictates abstracted from experience, James encourages us to take
experience at face value and go back to the rough ground of our prac-
tices. This acknowledgment represents the reflective step when doing
moral philosophy in a pragmatic mood.
In the ethical discourse moral theories pretend to regulate the varie-
ties of moral facts from the outside of their experimentation by means
of general principles, missing in this way the tentative and explora-
tive character of the moral experiences in which they are embedded.16
The language of moral theory is rather unsatisfactory in describing the
relationship between moral reflection and the moral life. Because of its
generality and impartiality it tends to flatten the variety of moral expe-
riences animating our ordinary practices. Furthermore, so conceived,
moral theories tend to prescribe which facts are relevant for moral evalu-
ation, and how to individuate them, risking an acknowledgment of the
very norms we live by as stemming from the way in which we handle
moral experiences, thus losing any genuine touch with the latter.
According to James we are held captive by a picture of morality as
a prescriptive system of rules, and would be much better off resisting
this temptation by letting our ordinary practices speak for themselves.
James laments how this picture betrays in the first instance the very
phenomenology of moral experiences: we in fact do not experience any
evaluative pre-established order regulating our genuine moral views and
insights, and the conduct that these insights inspire responds solely to
parameters that we establish in the course of our ordinary and reflective
practices. When this awareness is missing or fails to deliver, we represent
moral theories as absolute devices – alien and impermeable to our moral
experience; thus, the moral life as subjected to philosophical require-
ments governs its potentialities from the above of its practices.
“Moral Philosopher” opens with the opposite auspice: that there will
be no final moral philosophy, and thus no fixed moral criterion, until
experiences will keep unfolding in our moral life. Ethics understood as
a reflective activity on moral experience should in fact be in service of
the moral life rather than dictating its possibilities in advance. The anti-
theoretical motif animating James’s reflection on ethics is explained in
terms of an insistence on the dangerousness of moral theories threat-
ening the complexity of moral experiences: James in fact pictures moral
reflection as an effort of attention and exercise in minding our ordinary
practices, rather than as an attempt at their foundation. What is at stake
in moral reflection is our very capacity of engagement with moral expe-
riences without taking refuge in theoretical formulas, which allegedly
capture their essence. James writes:
The main purpose of this paper is to show that there is no such thing
possible as an ethical philosophy dogmatically made up in advance.
We all help to determine the content of ethical philosophy so far as
we contribute to the race’s moral life. In other words, there can be no
final truth in ethics any more than in physics, until the last man has
had his experience and said his say. In the one case as in the other,
however, the hypotheses which we now make while waiting, and the
acts to which they prompt us, are among the indispensable condi-
tions which determine what that “say” shall be. (141)
Since ethics, in order to specify its very contents and strategies, has to
wait on experience, moral reflection should take its course from the
critical analysis and assessment of such experiences, as they are cashed
out in practice through the deeds and conducts of those living in their
light. According to James the very subject matter of moral philosophy
is determined by our moral experimentation and deeds, and not inde-
pendently from them – as a “dogmatically constituted” ethics would like
to. Our ongoing, positive contribution to the moral life leaves to moral
philosophy the utmost important reflective burden of investigating
the complexity of our ordinary practices and their stakes. It is in this
light that I read the central parts of “Moral Philosopher” – discussing
respectively the psychological, the metaphysical, and the casuistic

ethical questions – as inquiries into the moral life conducted from the
inside of that life’s unfolding, rather than from “sideways-on”:17 being
them the intellectual hypotheses which we make while living, such
inquiries makes sense only because our moral life is shaped and unfolds
in a certain way; if our moral life would have been different from how it
actually is, we should be asking according to James very different ques-
tions. Moral reflection will thus take its course from the inside of our
moral life in order to assess its strategies, presuppositions, and short-
comings, eventually enlightening our very understanding of the wider
texture of considerations in which our experiencing is embedded.
As an aside, it is important to notice how, contrary to conceptions,
theories do not frustrate experiences alone, but also our very subjec-
tivity in so far as the latter gets expressed in experiencing. In his essay
“The Sentiment of Rationality” James presents in fact the contrast I have
developed between theories and conceptions as one between contrac-
tions and expressions of one’s subjectivity. While theories tend to disre-
gard one’s subjectivity by portraying the validity of certain phenomena
as independent from one’s very perspective on them, conceptions exalt
that subjectivity by making one’s moods the final judge of their sound-
ness. James claims that philosophers and laypeople alike have always
been scared by the fact that the truth of a certain conduct or world-
view is grounded in nothing more, but also in nothing less, than one’s
personal orientation and outlook. Besides the well-known discredits of
the affective dimension of subjectivity, considered as too foggy and thus
unreliable to account for our practices of knowledge and conduct, there
is an entrenched assumption according to which a philosophical (or
scientific) theory worth the name should be justifiable independently
from any personal involvement with that theory’s phenomena. This
presumption – “a most miserable and inadequate substitute for the full-
ness of the truth ... [and] a monstrous abridgement of life” (WB: 61) – is
dictated, according to James, by the fear of discrediting one’s positions
when not dressed in the solemn clothing of a theory, irrespective of
subjectivity and responding to impersonal canons only. James writes:
Nothing could be more absurd than to hope for the definitive triumph
of any philosophy which should refuse to legitimate, and to legitimize
in an emphatic manner, the more powerful of our emotional and prac-
tical tendencies ... There is an overpowering desire at moments to escape
personality, to revel in the action of forces that have no respect of our
ego, to let the tides flow, even though they flow over us. (WB: 74–6)
Rationality, so it is claimed against all sorts of evidences, cannot and

should not be a matter of sensibility. This fear generates diffidence,
distrust, and even shame for one’s subjectivity, which we end up
depicting in impersonal terms so to never figure in our accounts of the
world. As he writes in Pragmatism, such debasement invites a certain
insincerity in our philosophical discussions since “the potentest of all
our premises is never mentioned” (P: 11).
James observes that this situation has unfortunate consequences
in the way we portray the nature and goal of philosophical activity
itself. James strenuously opposes this tendency because it distorts the
meaning and the point of advancing a philosophical view in the first
place. Philosophy, understood in terms of the advancement of theo-
ries, is unable to account for our doubts, perplexities and difficulties.
In contrast with this dominant understanding of philosophical activity
as an impersonal and dispassionate quest, James advocates a progres-
sive adjustment of our conceptions that would bring our prejudices
and peculiarities to light: a critical tool for addressing the difficulties of
experience, as expressed in our doubts, perplexities, and tentative solu-
tions. In the central parts of “Moral Philosopher” James addresses the
difficulties pertaining to different aspects of our moral reasoning and
imagination. As I shall now show in some detail, the discussion of these
aspects has the goal of making us mindful of the complexities at stake,
rather than offering us timeless solutions to the issue. The overlooking
of the hortatory register is exactly what brought generations of readers
to seek for theories and justifications where James offered conceptions
and elucidations.
Experiential soundness in, and constitutive

novelty of, ethics
The psychological question investigates the emergence and shape of our

moral views. Under this label James includes our ideals and judgments,
and wants to survey their grounds and structure. James tells us that this
is surely the most debated issue in ethics, and according to some the
only meta-ethical aspect worth considering in the first place. He refers
to the debate between the evolutionists and intuitionists (raging at the
time) as the paradigmatic example of such inquiries and debates over
the source, nature, and scope of our moral outlooks. James’s contempo-
raries debated such questions under the general headings of cognitivism
and non-cognitivism as the two (families of) meta-ethical options on
the table – a terminology still in vogue in most philosophical circles.
James, however, takes a radical and innovative approach to this ques-

tion: rather than presenting the terms of the debate in order to state his
preference for a theoretical option over the other, James is interested in
surveying the attitudes and presuppositions underlying both conceptions,
in order to possibly shed some light on them by showing the conse-
quences of their endorsement.
In the discussion of the psychological question James tackles the
respective assumptions governing the two different approaches to the
emergence and nature of moral ideals, commenting on their plausibility
as well as their desirability. Rather than telling us which approach is the
correct one, and thus which position we should endorse when engaged
in moral reasoning, James is interested in making us reflect on what is at
stake when conceiving moral ideals in one way rather than another. He
thus seeks to enlighten us about what it is going on when we engage in
such reflection. As is the case for other aspects of moral thought that he
shall tackle in the essay, James is not interested in advancing a positive
theory about how to perceive the moral life, but rather wants to give the
latter prominence and let it speak for itself – so to get a better under-
standing of what is implicit in our practices. Pace this Jamesian picture,
moral reflection is an activity that, departing from the primacy of our
ordinary moral dealings and their complexity, addresses and instructs
our speculation on them – rather than staring from an array of intellec-
tual desiderata and trying to account for the moral life. Ethics practiced
this way aims at improving our moral life by questioning (and possibly
transforming) our comprehension from the inside, rather than trying
to improve our moral life by projecting onto it an external intellectual
requirement.
Despite the apparent straightforwardness of the text, it is not easy
to follow the precise dialectic through which such radical operation is
carried out. In my commentary I shall thus proceed piecemeal. James
opens the discussion of this aspect of moral thought by way of a few
examples:
When your ordinary doctor of divinity has proved to his own satis-
faction that an altogether unique faculty called “conscience” must
be postulated to tell us what is right and what is wrong; or when
your popular-science enthusiast has proclaimed that “apriorism”
is an exploded superstition, and that our moral judgments have
gradually resulted from the teaching of the environment, each of
these persons thinks that ethics is settled and nothing more is to
be said. (142)
James claims that both of these antagonistic presumptions pretended

to fully account for this delicate moral issue (and sometimes of ethics
altogether) by making reference either to an alleged innate faculty or
to the influence of the environment. Despite their differences, these
solutions share the aim of justifying our moral judgments by means
of a single theoretical device or explanatory story. According to James
both attitudes reflect, in this respect, a degree of shortsightedness for the
complexity of the issue at stake; and, rather than voicing his own posi-
tive solution or preference, he is interested in complicating the scenario
with new insights so as to invite the participants to reconsider their own
positions.
James is in fact interested on the one hand in stressing the impor-
tance of appreciating the empirical feature of moral ideas – as stressed
by the empiricists/evolutionists, who depicted them as the expression
of our personal involvement in their establishment and evaluation –
while showing at the same time how in some cases it seems dangerous
to wholly account for them in terms of empirical association with past
experiences alone – as the intuitionists stressed in order escape from the
tyranny of the past. In fact, there might be situations in which it is more
promising to describe our moral ideals as derived from a direct percep-
tion of some value, rather than from association and comparison with
past or similar experiences. But this does not necessarily mean that, in
being so envisioned, such ideals suddenly fall outside the scope of expe-
rience themselves. The two different pulls – the grounding of judgment
in experience and the distrust of experience – are both felt at the ordi-
nary level as well, and it is James’s interest to bring this tension to the
surface to better address it and eventually figure out a way of releasing
it. The exploration of this possibility allowed James to complicate the
picture of the psychological question as it had been customarily framed,
thus giving the respective parties more food for thought.
James – apologizing for the packed discussion of such vast and impor-
tant themes, that might have sounded as dogmatic as the position he was
addressing – evaluates the consequences of postulating a single theoret-
ical explanation, of the kind the two parties offered. Both the empiricist
and the intuitionist explanations have merits that are complementary
to the faults of the opposite side. According to James empiricism, both
in its classical (British) and modern (Darwinian) versions, has done
“lasting service” in surveying a great number of our human ideals and
showing the experiential roots of our moral evaluations and judgments.
Yet, understood as the only principle of moral appraisal, empirical asso-
ciation seems to lack feasibility in its clash with some further “empirical
evidences.” There seems, in fact, to be a number of ideals that cannot be

explained by means of such principle. James writes:
The more minutely psychology studies human nature, the more

clearly it finds there traces of secondary affections, relating the
impressions of the environment with one another and with our
impulses in quite different ways from those mere associations of
coexistence and succession which are practically all that pure empir-
icism can admit. (143)
The examples of these “secondary affections” suggested by James are

the most variegated. He numbers, among others, the emotions for the
comical, the passion for poetry, for mathematics, or for metaphysics,
and claims that the impression of the environment and past experiences
might well accompany them, but not fully account for them.
James’s first stab at an explanation of these affections is physiological,
and makes reference to our very inborn brain configuration:
They go with other things that can be so explained, no doubt; and

some of them are prophetic of future utilities, since there is nothing
in us for which some use may not be found. But their origin is in
incidental complications to our cerebral structure, a structure whose
original features arose with no reference to the perception of such
discords and harmonies as these. (142)
This quasi-scientific explanation is the only explicit reference to our

innate constitution advanced in the essay. It should be taken as nothing
more than a reference to his work in psychology, which James explic-
itly mentions as a reference. In fact such explanation does not perform
any speculative work in the essay, which moves soon after to a philo-
sophical level of analysis. Furthermore, it is not at all surprising that, in
the discussion of what is known as the “psychological question,” James
makes some reference to psychology, if only a scanty one. The concur-
rence of the psychological with the philosophical register is a tricky one
to characterize in James, and yet it represents a constitutive feature of
the issue at stake. In order to throw some light on their intertwinement
and respective workings in this context I shall briefly comment upon
the text James refers to in the note.
James mentions the last chapter of PP, “Necessary Truths and Their
Effects on Experience,” in which he tackles at some depth a companion
theme. In the chapter he investigates the nature and psychogenesis
of some of the truths we live by and of relations whose validity does

not seem to be derived from the coupling with previous experiences.
He writes that there seems to be a number of truths and relations that,
despite having empirical grounding, cannot be explained by means
of the empiricist mechanism of association or similarity alone. What
James is here addressing is the very issue of a pragmatic characterization
of experience and experiencing, in which the notion of truth as mere
passive mirroring is debunked as dangerous and hopeless, and our stance
toward reality is redescribed as inventive and engaged in character.
In order to avoid some of the most nagging protests that character-
ized the reading of these (and other) pages, it is important to notice how
James is discussing here some peculiar field and aspects of experience,
limiting his consideration to such domains as mathematic, metaphysics,
aesthetics and ethics – although some interpreters resisted this strategy
of “damage control” (Gavin 2013) as deeply anti-Jamesian. According
to James, those truths that we find stated in such fields of discourse and
practice are, in a sense, necessary, because of their relative independ-
ence from the truths empirically stated in previous experiencing, against
which they are often judged. In the dense section on “Aesthetic and
Moral Principles” James ruminates on this characterization, claiming
something of major importance for the “psychological question”
discussed in “Moral Philosopher.” He writes:
The moral principles which our mental structure engenders are quite
as little explicable in toto by habitual experiences having bred inner
cohesions. Rightness is not mere usualness, wrongness not mere oddity,
however numerous the facts which might be invoked to prove such
identity. Nor are the moral judgments those most invariably and
emphatically impressed on us by public opinion. The most character-
istically and peculiarly moral judgments that a man is ever called on
to make are in unprecedented cases and lonely emergencies, where
no popular rhetorical maxims can avail, and the hidden oracle alone
can speak; and it speaks often in favor of conduct quite unusual, and
suicidal as far as gaining popular approbation goes. The forces which
conspire to this resultant are subtle harmonies and discords between
the elementary ideas which form the data of the case. Some of these
harmonies, no doubt, have to do with habit; but in respect to most
of them our sensibility must assuredly be a phenomenon of super-
numerary order, correlated with a brain-function quite as secondary
as that which takes cognizance of the diverse excellence of elaborate
musical compositions. No more than the higher musical sensibility
can the higher moral sensibility be accounted for by the frequency

with which outer relations have cohered. (PP: 1265, fourth emphasis
mine)
This long and complex paragraph contains many of the ingredients and
insights that we find explored by James in the central sections of “Moral
Philosopher,” as well as in his other moral writings. It is very important
to stress again how James is here attentive in noticing how only some
moral judgment and principles seem to resist to be “explicable in toto”
by reference to their association with habitual experiences. James is thus
not advancing a substantive claim about the function of all moral judging
and evaluation, but rather a descriptive one about how some of them do
effectively seem to function. His observations about the psychological
impossibility of explaining all moral ideals by means of reference to past
experience, is coupled with a philosophical claim about the dangerous-
ness that such assumptions would imply. There are, according to James,
a number of moral ideals that we find compelling, despite their flying
in the face of established rules; just as there are things that we regard as
good per se, regardless of their being associated with others considered as
such by “public opinion.” This proviso is pivotal for his characterization
of the most penetrating ethical choices as those breaking with the estab-
lished order, which he explores at greater length in the following two
sections of “Moral Philosopher” on the metaphysical and casuistic ques-
tion, where his reservations for some other assumptions and pretension
of the intuitionist approach come to the fore.
Going back to the main argumentative line of the section under discus-
sion, James presents the psychological register debating the allegedly
sui generis character of certain moral ideals and principles. In “Moral
Philosopher” he writes:
A vast number of our moral perceptions also ... deal with directly felt
fitnesses between things, and often fly in the teeth of all the prepos-
sessions of habit and presumptions of utility ... The sense for abstract
justice which some persons have is as eccentric a variation, from
the natural-history point of view, as is the passion for music or for
the higher philosophical consistencies which consumes the soul of
others. The feeling of the inward dignity of certain spiritual attitudes,
as peace, serenity, simplicity, veracity; and of the essential vulgarity
of others, as querulousness, anxiety, egoistic fussiness, etc. – are quite
inexplicable except by an innate preference of the more ideal attitude
for its own pure sake. (143)
The examples given partially match the ones listed in PP, which James
completed at around the same time (although begun some 12 years
before). James draws a distinction here between two ways in which we
can face and evaluate a certain situation: either from the point of view
of their soundness with previous experiences and evaluations (often
in terms of utility) – as the empiricists want; or, regardless of previous
experiences and evaluations and following our personal bias only,
thus contrasting the principle of association and habitual experience,
when presented as exhaustive explanatory models – as the intuition-
ists do. James concentrates on the second case as the more interesting
one. Sometimes in fact, he claims, we face certain situations with a
distinctive attitude that is quite inexplicable, by making reference to
sheer considerations about past utility or pleasure. Some authors read in
these passages a critique of the notions of utility and habit, apparently
discarded from James’s moral vocabulary. The very same critics also
denounce a certain inconsistency with James’s later discussion of the
metaphysical and the casuistic questions, in which such notions seem
to be instead celebrated as the centerpiece of his moral theory.18 In order
to explain the inadequacy of such different reconstructions we should
once more pay attention to the tone and register of these passages, as
well as to James’s overall intent in discussing them.
In this section James is interested in surveying various approaches
to the psychological question and spotting the correspondent atti-
tudes and motivations underlying each of them. Besides criticizing the
pretensions of the parties in place (and in particular of the empiricist
and intuitionist schools in vogue at his time) to be able to explain
all our moral ideals and preferences by making reference to a single
explanatory principle, he is also trying to integrate these various
options with some moral insights (backed up, as noticed, with physi-
ological, psychological, and philosophical considerations) about some
most apt ways of accounting for certain ideals and principles that we
encounter and most importantly cherish in the moral life. However, it
is my contention that James is neither dismissing nor subscribing to
the insights and notions that he finds circulating in the moral debate
of the time, but rather he is interested in investigating how, and in
which measure, the insights actually play any role in our moral lives,
and thus why we, as philosophers, should account for such insights in
our reflective investigations – or bother with them at all. What we find
in these passages is thus a problematization of some central notions
circulating in the meta-ethical debate – for example utility, pleasure,
and habitual experiences as against intuition, secondary affections and
novel variations – and an investigation of their place in our ordinary

practice of judgment and evaluation.
Further evidence for this reconstruction comes from other corollary
texts on the same issue. In the notes for his “Philosophy 4: Ethics –
Recent English Contributions to Theistic Ethics (1888–1889)” course
James questions the idea that moral evaluations would spring only from
consideration of utility, related to past experiences or the environmental
situations in which they occurred. Although this text is a manuscript
lecture – its prime aim is presenting his students with the positions
circulating at the time – James mounts an elaborate reconstruction of
the major arguments often informing the discussion of these themes,
suggesting some new lines of investigation. The text reads as a complex
assessment of the major views in place, and yet also represents a critical
assessment. Regarding the issue of moral evaluations, James sketches a
quick overview of the state of the art, expressing once more his skepti-
cism about the possibility to reduce “the innumerable ways in which
men have been led to their judgments that things are good and bad”
to utility or the indirect influence of the environment alone: the moral
ideals we usually consider as most valuable – for example “consistency,
veracity, justice, nobility, dignity, and purity” (ML: 182–3) seem to be
hardly accountable in those terms.
But James is not inviting us to get rid of the notions of utility and
habitual association when engaging in moral reflection; rather, he is
critical of the way in which these notions have been described by the
empiricist tradition, inviting us to rethink their place in our moral life.
In fact, considerations of usefulness and the mechanism of habitual
association play a crucial role in our moral decisions, and yet sometimes
they are unable to catch the gist of some of our moral perceptions and
ideals, because of their tendency to portray them as mere duplications
or passive recognition of past decisions and evaluations. In other cases
they could even clash with our most genuine moral intuitions – as, for
example, suggested by the infliction of suffering on a “lost soul” for the
salvation of a thousand others – in which considerations of utility seem
hardly acceptable and past solutions based on them of little use.
According to James some of our moral ideals and principles should
not be reduced to the sheer associations of usefulness or pleasure with
past experiences and choices at pains of missing their particular char-
acter (as in the case of specific moral concepts not directly connected
with considerations of personal advantage) or because of the unwel-
come consequences (as, for example, the frustration of our best ener-
gies to come up with an unexpected and original conduct). Some moral
ideals are in fact characterized by an element of novelty and freshness

that necessarily escapes older and tested solutions: very often they refer
to some unique and hardly imitable individual trait or stance called
forth by such a particular situation. Such stances and traits could be
expressed by moral concepts not reducible to those of goodness or right-
ness, concepts that refer to the felt quality of a certain situation and
express our immediate reaction.
Although we might be puzzled by James’s choice of examples –
wondering for example whether we would associate “wickedness” with
consequences and “meanness” or “vulgarity” with immediate reactive
attitudes – still the general dialectic he is interested in highlighting
should be clear. This distinction between the evaluation of a certain situ-
ation that we might give on the basis of its consequences or previous
evaluations, and the one we can offer by making reference to one’s
immediate sensibility and capacity for response shows two different atti-
tudes that James contrasts. While, in the first case, consequences and
the importance of past and similar experiences are emphasised, in the
second, the emphasis is on felt quality and the novelty of a certain situ-
ation. The former choice is driven, according to James, by the desire to
ground our moral discriminations and judgments in experience and by
making reference to its background and consequences; while the latter
expresses the uniqueness and situated character of moral choices and
the concern with casuistry models pretending to account for the future
(the what has to be thought or done) in terms of the past (what has been
thought or done).
This characterization has some momentous bearings on the way we
portray the dynamics of our moral understanding: it points to a plurality
of ways in which we can respond morally to a certain situation. James
invites us to consider such diverse diverse understanding the origins of
moral distinctions and the various attitudes moving underlying them.
Some moral ideals and principles, of which James is particularly inter-
ested in showing the centrality in our moral lives, far from mirroring
any received order of experiences and values, or referring to past conse-
quences, contribute to the moral character and meaningfulness of a situ-
ation through the affirmation of original deeds which express our point
of view. It is precisely this generative dimension that contrasts with the
backward-looking character of considerations of past utility or adequacy.
James emphatically writes how in such central cases:
Purely inward forces are certainly at work. All the higher, more pene-
trating ideals are revolutionary. They present themselves far less in the
guise of effects of past experience than in that of probable causes of

future experience, factors to which the environment and the lessons
it has so far taught us must learn to bend. (144)
According to James the moral sensibility accompanying the higher,

more penetrating ideals has an inventive character because its exercise
requires us to engage reality by challenging received ways of under-
standing and evaluating its problematic character. This represents
a much healthier attitude toward one’s moral ideals and principles,
because of its celebration of the essentially perspectival attribution of
value and significance.
In some cases, says James, this is not only the most promising atti-
tude, in its being able to detect values and ideals that would otherwise
have gone missing when considering past consequences alone, but also
the most profitable and refreshing, because it calls for a reconsideration
of the whole situation and of its moral acceptability from the point of
view of its attunement with our inward preferences and sensibility. For
James the stress on activity and on inventive engagement is central for
conducting a healthy moral life, and a philosophical investigation of
the moral life should celebrate it as the chief ethical stance we might
assume towards ourselves and the world. The references to one’s “purely
inward forces” will be a major theme in the following part of the essay,
as well as in the moral writings in which James shall stress individu-
ality and its expressive capacities as the central feature of one’s moral
life. That discussion shall also clarify how James aims to rehabilitate the
notion of intuition, by clearing it from any transcendental or metaphys-
ical anchorage and showing instead how the healthiest understanding
of it – one that, as he started to show, can profitably communicate with
the notion of experience – is in terms of its immediate embodiment in
our ordinary practice of evaluation and judgment.
As a last methodological comment on James’s discussion of the
psychological question, it is important to note how James is interested
in shifting the very terms of the discussion. This point is of particular
significance for the issue of the therapeutic and transformative nature
of the essay. The discussion of this aspect of moral thought has not
revolved around the alleged neat opposition between experience and
intuition, understood as the grounds and criteria for moral distinctions
(as modern moral philosophy has often assumed), but rather around
the different motivations driving both conceptions – with empiricism
and intuitionism depicted as diverging (but reconcilable) accounts of
the ways our moral ideals and principles are grounded in experience,
or rather represent a guide to it. James is interested in investigating

and exploring the different attitudes that characterize our practice of
moral evaluation. According to James both the empiricist and intui-
tionist schools of thought used to depict this aspect of ethics in terms
of discovery, accounting for our moral notions by referring to either
received information or some transcendental constitution, and thus
conveying a pretty static (and potentially deadening) attitude toward
the moral life. James invites us to look at this aspect of ethics in inven-
tive terms: by giving voice to our inmost sensibilities and capacity to
respond as cashed out in experience we might find novel ways of genuinely
expressing our engaged attitude to reality and ourselves. This means
reconsidering what both conceptions strive to achieve, and thus trying
to indicate a path for their coexistence. The praise for such an inventive
stance is even more pronounced in the discussion of the metaphysical
and casuistic questions that follows.
Thought experiments and imagination in ethics
Shifting now to the metaphysical question, we encounter a new array of

issues that James tackles, with the goal of throwing light on this aspect
of our philosophical investigations on the moral life. James’s treat-
ment of “what we mean by the words ‘obligation’, ‘good’, and ‘ill’” is
pivotal for the understanding of his conception of moral thought as a
critical clarification of the moral life. The interpretation of this section
is complicated since it is not easy to spot in its dialectic the hortatory
leitmotiv informing it. As for the psychological question, the goal of my
heterodox reading of this section will thus be to bring such register to
light and show it at work.
According to James our words and language reveal our moral life; so,
by investigating their usage and grounds we can attain a better picture
of the way we see things and give our language moral currency. James
tackles this theme in two steps: first by surveying the various competing
accounts of some of our central moral terms, and then by discussing
their plausibility and shortcomings.
James begins by noticing how it appears that our moral vocabulary
“have no application or relevancy in a world in which no sentient life
exists;” such words as “obligation,” “good,” and “ill” seem in fact mean-
ingless and lacking any reference in a world devoid of any “interested
spectator.” He asks us to imagine such a world, and notices how in such
circumstances the very status of such notions seems ungrounded and
even pointless to question, even though philosophers having often
entertained the very idea as a theoretical and worthwhile possibility.

James is clear that it is the moral life we know which he is interested in –
not its idealization, with which philosophers often play. In a world such
as ours, we are inclined to grant the meaningfulness of moral distinc-
tions only in the presence of someone who is able to vindicate or rather
challenge them. James claims:
Goodness, badness, and obligation must be realized somewhere in

order really to exist; and the first step in ethical philosophy is to see
that no merely inorganic “nature of things” can realize them. Neither
moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only
habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of
merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propo-
sitions apply. (145)
In this quotation there are listed all the ingredients of what might be
called James’s metaphysics of values; which, far from being a traditional
metaphysics (that is, a substantive ontology of moral properties), is
rather a metaphysics ex parte subiecti (a phenomenological account of
the grounds and uses of our moral language). James, far from imposing
a particular view of the constituents of the world, is rather interested
in showing and evaluating various possible accounts of our responses
in respect of the grounding and use of the moral language. James in
fact works this view by means of a series of thought experiments that,
rather than laying down at the outset some theoretical principle of
meaningfulness, refers to the practical ways we give significance to
our moral language, as the only criterion available to us to evaluate its
grounding.19
James claims that, by taking a look at our ways of responding to
the thought experiments that he presents us with, we shall acknowl-
edge that moral words have meaning only when there is an activity
of evaluation lying beneath them; that is, only when human beings
exercise their sensibilities by responding to the relevant aspects of
the world engaging them. James’s emphasis is not on the presence
of mere sensitivities, as most scholars have argued, but on the actual
presence of activity itself, as a mark of the presence and legitimacy
of moral relations. In a world without human beings there could be
no moral notions since nobody would exercise them. Moral sensibili-
ties are important, but only in their exercise and realization through
one’s conduct and deeds. The grounds of values would thus lie in our
nature of agents practically committed in their realization. However,
this conclusion is not the result of a transcendental argument. This

is clear as we move to the second step of the argument, where James
assesses the plausibility of this picture by showing its footing in our
concrete moral practices.
According to James, moral ideas and relations are not independent of
our thinking and actions. Yet that is not sufficient to establish what we
might call their truth. James invites the reader to consider the common-
sensical idea according to which truth “supposes a standard outside of
the thinker to which he must conform.” As James writes, the truth of
our attributions of value seems to call for a standard external to the
subject claiming them, since without such a standard there would be
no possibility of error. Once it has been argued that moral words find a
secure footing in the exercise of our sensibility, James wants to show that
this understanding does not commit one to some version of moral solip-
sism, a “moral solitude” quite unacceptable as a feature of the “ethical
universe.” James asks us to imagine a universe inhabited by only one
human being, and wonders whether in this scenario moral relations
would hold or not. His answer is peremptory:
In such an universe as that it would of course be absurd to raise the

question of whether the solitary thinker’s judgments of good and ill
are good or not. Truth supposes a standard outside the thinker to
which he must conform ... In such a moral solitude it is clear that
there can be no outward obligation, and that the only trouble the
god-like thinker is liable to have will be over the consistency of his
own several ideals with one another. (146)
Given what James has claimed so far, this statement could sound quite
surprising. How is it possible to claim that we help establish the reality of
moral notions, and at the same time that their truth requires a standard
outside the thinker to which they must conform? As the text unfolds a
line of reply becomes visible.20 James is in fact well aware of the problem,
and states that in a moral solitude “it would be absurd” to question
the truth of one’s statements. It is, however, surprisingly overlooked, or
forgotten, that James had just begun his progression of thought experi-
ments: quite some ground has still to be covered before he arrives at
spelling out the full picture of the ethical universe in which, he posits,
our moral life actually takes place. James is here accompanying us in an
imaginative journey in which, rather than state his own definitive views
and back them with some alleged metaphysical theory of value, he tests
our ordinary and intellectual responses to the various possibilities and
scenarios proposed, in order to progressively approach the moral life we

know and practice on a daily basis.
The issue of the possibility and nature of moral truth is surveyed
through another round of thought experiments that James invites us to
consider. James asks us to imagine a universe inhabited by two and then
by a multitude of individuals. He suggests that, even by multiplying
the number of inhabitants, the situation does not seem to improve as
long as each individual is insensible to the others’ claims and views. At
best, there would be a “moral multitude,” in which no proportion can
be found and conversation established. However, this is also quite an
unsatisfactory situation, since there would be no ethical universe in a
robust sense at all, and also presents difficulties for the moral philoso-
pher trying to find the moral relations among things – which, as we
remember, is James’s self-imposed reflective goal of the essay. What
would still be lacking is precisely what ties the various discrete view-
points together at all. Over this situation hovers the specter of skepti-
cism, that at the beginning of the essay James evoked precisely as the
possibility that the moral philosopher should resist, if she wants to
contribute – both intellectually and practically – to the ordinary moral
life. Skepticism is a concession to the moral relativist who, by thinking
one’s moral judgments as the sheer expressions of a point of view, denies
any possibility of moral conversation and progress.
James, far from denying the possibility (and regrettable actuality)
of such a scenario, tries rather to show its undesirability. To do so, he
introduces another key word of our moral vocabulary: obligation. Once
again, James’s method for assessing its meaning and use is to examine
the place and weight of such a concept in our everyday practice. So far,
writes James, our situation seems to be the following: on the one hand
we are inclined to think that that moral relations depend on the exercise
of our sensibilities alone, while on the other we have admitted that such
grounding is not sufficient per se to the achievement of a moral commu-
nity in which the notion of truth has some room and edge.
James’s solution to this puzzle lies in the characterization of obliga-
tion as a concrete, normative commitment to reality as contrasted to an
abstract principle “floating in the atmosphere.” We fall into the above
inconsistency and impasse only if we picture morality in theoretical
terms: the abstract comparison between the worth of different states of
affairs. If otherwise we conceive moral obligation in practical terms – the
expression of the claims actually made by human beings in flesh and
blood – we can hold together the idea that the exercise of our sensibili-
ties is the source of moral distinctions and the proviso that their truth
conditions are not exhausted in their abstract conceivability or desir-

ability. By surveying our ordinary practices we see that moral ideals and
principles acquire any footing and validity only when actually claimed,
and thus when we feel bounded to their mandate. James writes:
Like positive attributes good and bad, the comparatives ones better
or worse must be realized in order to be real. If one ideal judgment be
objectively better than another, that betterness must be made flesh
by being lodged concretely in someone’s actual perception ... Its esse is
percipi, like the esse of the ideals themselves between which it obtains.
(147)
Here James is refuting a deceptive picture of ethics whose purely theo-

retical character clashes with the practical one of our concrete moral
lives. James is here warning us of a certain picture of moral ideas and
judgments whose a-priori character clashes with the a-posteriori one of
the concrete moral lives in which they are lodged and expressed. Against
this picture, he claims that, in order to grasp the genuine nature of moral
claims, we must look at the way individuals actually hold their moral
notions and question those of their fellow beings. As far as the task
of a philosophical reflection on ethics is that of critically accounting
the diverse ways of articulating and justifying the complexities of the
moral life, the moral philosopher should be satisfied when the subjects
involved acknowledge such dynamics and accept their outcomes. The
task of the moral philosopher is in fact that of surveying such real vindi-
cations without forcing them into any particular preconceived direc-
tion. James writes:
The philosopher, therefore, who seeks to know which ideal ought

to have supreme weight and which one ought to be subordinated,
must trace the ought itself to the de facto constitution of some existing
consciousness, behind which, as one of the data of the universe, he as
a purely ethical philosopher is unable to go. (147)
Far from championing any particular vision of goodness or obligation to

which all participants should bend their heads, the moral philosopher
shall more modestly be satisfied, when analyzing and assessing such
concepts, with elucidating their meanings by making reference to the
concrete lives in which they are lodged. For the moral philosopher the
various moral judgments and obligations she finds positively endorsed
and lived by in the moral life are, in fact, the ultimate data that should
not be transcended on pains of betraying its best promises: resisting

both skepticism and moralism.
However, James acknowledges the existence of a number of impedi-
ments endangering our very sound grasp of the nature of our attribu-
tions of values and the grounds of the obligation such attributions
generate internal to the moral life, to which moral reflection should pay
special attention. Here the terminology that James uses is of the utmost
importance, since it reveals the therapeutic and transformative register
of his discussion. In questioning the nature of our attributions of value
and the obligations they generate, James claims that there are both
intellectual and ordinary impediments which hinder us from giving an
adequate answer; that is, an answer that is expressive of our unbiased
moral responses. James presents such impediments as tendencies and
superstitious views that we unwittingly subscribe to when discussing such
issues. To bring to light – and eventually eradicate by lifting us from
their grip – is the task of moral reflection understood as a hortatory and
transformative activity. James writes:
In our first essays at answering this question [about the ground of

obligation], there is an inevitable tendency to slip into an assump-
tion which ordinary men follow when they are disputing with one
another about questions of good and bad. They imagine an abstract
moral order in which the objective truth resides; and each tries to
prove that this pre-existing order is more accurately reflected in his
own ideas that in those of his adversary. It is because one disputant
is backed by this over-arching abstract order that we think the other
should submit. (148)
When we portray the validity of a moral judgment or obligation by

referring to an abstract moral order allegedly backing them, we are
according to James alienating our expressive capacities to an abstrac-
tion. This assumption jeopardizes the appreciation of the individual
source of moral distinctions because it describes our capacity to make
moral distinctions and give voice to moral concerns as the mirroring of
a higher axiological order,21 and not as the genuine expression of our
engaged sensibility, as cashed out in practice to respond to what is often
a unique situation.
It is important to pay attention to the dialectic that James uses to
diagnose this human condition, which calls for a better kind of philo-
sophical therapy. In the text there is in fact a double register in place:
philosophical and ordinary. James is denouncing the presence of this
“inevitable tendency” both in our ordinary life and in our philosoph-

ical reconstructions of it. In fact, the assumptions holding individuals
captive, when thinking and discussing moral questions in their everyday
business, are the very same ones that philosophy tends to project onto
the moral life. The contrast between an abstract moral order and the
effective empirical ways in which we think and formulate moral distinc-
tions, with their correlated obligations, is the outcome of a projection
of substantive and abstract requirements on the various fields of our
ordinary moral lives, as well as on the reflective activity on them. James
is interested in neutralizing such tendencies, showing both their artifici-
ality and dangerousness.
Any strategy of emancipation from this condition should thus take
into consideration this double register, ordinary and reflective, on which
such a temptation is articulated. The analysis offered by James moves
at the reflective level in order to throw light on some intellectualistic
tendencies affecting our ordinary practices, showing how the resources
to free us from their grip has to be detected in our moral phenome-
nology. This human tendency can be contrasted by an accurate descrip-
tion of the way in which – and the reason why – such attitudes arise in
the first place. James invites us to take a closer look at the ways in which
moral ideas and obligations are justified and articulated in our moral
life. According to James there would in fact be a plain correspondence
between moral claims and obligations that in normal situations we do
not seem to question. He writes that:
The moment we take a steady look at the question, we see not only
that without a claim actually made by some concrete person there
can be no obligation, but that there is some obligation wherever there
is a claim. Our ordinary attitude of regarding ourselves as subject to
an overarching system of moral relations, true “in themselves,” is
therefore either an out-and-out superstition, or else it must be treated
as a merely provisional abstraction from that real Thinker in whose
actual demand upon us to think as he does our obligation must be
ultimately based. (148)
For James it is difficult to acknowledge such an identity between claims

and obligations since, for a variety of reasons, we tend to reverse the
order of logical priority between the legitimacy of the former and the
obligatory weight of the latter. As James notes, we are inclined to think
that, before advancing a claim, we have to assess the conditions of that
claim’s moral legitimacy against something outside it, but this means
picturing the validity of the claim, and thus its obligatory character, as
depending on something additional to its mere existence. This is because
the very thought of our moral life depending entirely on our active energy
is quite frightening and burdens us with a certain responsibility. There is
for James an almost tragic dimension to such a constitution, which calls
for what a heroics of the everyday and its unbroken moral burden.
But what else, James asks, could count as an obligation if not something
actually claimed? The point here is, if you will, metaphysical in a strict
sense: before something is actually claimed, there is nothing on which
obligation can intervene. Still, such identification between claims and
obligations is often overlooked, and James is interested in understanding
why that is the case and how to refrain from such superstition:
I know well how hard it is for those who are accustomed to what I have
called the superstitious view, to realize that every de facto claim creates
in so far forth an obligation. We inveterately think that something
which we call the “validity” of the claim is what gives to it its obliga-
tory character, and that this validity is something outside of the claim’s
mere existence as a matter of fact. It rains down upon the claim, we
think, from some sublime dimension of being, which the moral law
inhabits, much as upon the steel of the compass-needle the influence
of the Pole rains down from out of the starry heavens. (148)22
According to James the superstitious view consists in the temptation to

intellectualize our practices of moral attribution expressed at the ordi-
nary level, and thus the way in which we depict the reflective contribu-
tion to ethics. What we should be getting rid of is thus, not the reflective
activity on our ordinary practices, but rather the necessity to project
on it substantive intellectualistic requirements. For James the role of
moral reflection is that of showing an alternative, often before our eyes
yet rarely appreciated, which would strip the superstitious view of his
attractiveness. In the case under consideration the superstitious view
is articulated as an intellectualistic bias on the normative and binding
character of our moral claims, justified independently from our personal
commitments and positive endorsements, and its overcoming consists
in a re-description of the ways in which our moral claims and demands
can be genuinely expressive of our moral outlook and at the same time
aspire to a degree of objectivity and necessity.
When we predicate the good or ill of a behaviour or situation we are
giving voice to our overall vision of things and how they strike us, and
thus the obligatory character of our claims refer only to the demands
and commitments we advance while formulating such claims. James
observes that, in looking for a source of legitimation other than the

obligatory character of our demands, we distort the very significance
and point of advancing a claim: in fact, the only thing that could hinder
the endorsement of a claim is another claim. He writes:
Take any demand however slight, which any creature, however

weak, may make. Ought it not, for its own sake, to be satisfied?
If not, prove why not. The only possible kind of proof you could
adduce would be the exhibition of another creature who should
make a demand that ran the other way. The only possible reason
there can be why any phenomenon ought to exist is that such a
phenomenon actually is desired. Any desire is imperative to the
extent of its amount; it makes itself valid by the fact that it exists
at all. ... The only force of appeal to us, which either a living God or
an abstract ideal order can wield, is found in the “everlasting ruby
values” of our own human hearts, as they happen to beat responsive
and not irresponsive to the claim. (149)
According to James this might well be an uncomfortable situation to

face, and thus we look for refuge in a transcendental foundation for our
practices that however figures at best as a superstition or an idealiza-
tion flying in the teeth of any empirical reconstruction.23 Discarding
the possibility of any extra-empirical foundation of our moral life, James
encourages us to acknowledge the utterly tentative character of our moral
transactions. A genuine universe, from the ethical point of view, will be
staged when, rather than being indifferent to each others’ demands and
obligations, or trying to secure them on some absolute scale, we strive to
look at those demands as the expression of individual subjectivities, and
acknowledge their full dignity and binding character.
Moral objectivity thus consists in accounting for such demands and
being responsive to them, exactly because they hinge on concrete
commitments which spring from the “everlasting ruby values of our
human hearts.” James adds that, understood in this way, claims are
incommensurably stronger and more stable than any abstract prescrip-
tion of an ideal theory to which they might allegedly refer. He writes:
A claim thus livingly acknowledged is acknowledged with a solidity

and fullness which no thought of an “ideal” backing can render more
complete; while if, on the other hand, the heart’s response is with-
held, the stubborn phenomenon is there of an impotence in the
claims which the universe embodies, which no talk about an eternal
nature of things can glaze over or dispel. (149–50)
Our ways of responding to the demands waived by other individuals

represent the conditions and grounds of the “ethical republic here
below”. According to James, we are all engaged in building such republic
in the course of our human practices, and it is the task of philosophy
to reinforce such project with further particulars and strategies so to
brush away (perhaps once for all) or rather (momentarily) remove from
our sight the impediments resisting us from seeing clearly what is fairly
engrained in our ordinary practice of evaluation and judgment alike.
However, given the fragile equilibrium of such a project, a number
of elements seem to endanger the process of securing – and recon-
structing – an ethical republic so conceived. This bears on the discussion
of the casuistic question, whose subject matter is precisely the analysis
of our ways of weighting claims and obligations, of which James is once
again interested in surveying the underlying assumptions and motiva-
tions in an attempt to instruct us about them.
Therapy, transformation, and moral experimentation
It is by discussing the casuistic aspect of morality that James’s criticism

of moral theories – understood as intellectual devices imposing a moral
order from the above – appears more clearly; and, consequently, his
hortatory conception of ethics comes fully into view. James’s dissat-
isfaction with ethics, conceived “in the old-fashioned absolute sense
of the term,” is due to its theoretical, as opposed to practical, inspi-
ration. When discussing the most pressing, practical and normative
aspects of our moral lives James takes a pragmatist view, by empha-
sizing what he takes to be the hortatory and anti-foundational gist of
moral reflection.
In this section James reflects on the role of the moral philosopher
in facing the moral disagreements, the “wars of flesh and spirit in
each man,” and the conflicts – principled, ideological, and religious –
spreading in our societies: and, in particular, the understanding we
should have of the way philosophical reflection should address this
problematic situation without falling into the two undesirable alterna-
tives of skepticism and moralism, and betraying the genuine efforts of
the philosopher to ameliorate the moral life by elucidating its presup-
positions and encourage experimentation. James writes:
We stand ourselves at present in the place of that philosopher, and

must not fail to realize all the features that the situation comports.
In the first place we will not be sceptics; we hold to it that there is a
truth to be ascertained. But in the second place we have just gained

the insight that that truth cannot be a self-proclaiming set of laws, or
an abstract “moral reason,” but can only exist in act, or in the shape
of an opinion held by some thinker really to be found. (151)
Better chaos forever than an order based on any closet-philosopher’s
rule, even though he were the most enlightened possible member of
his tribe. (155)
The only viable path to be taken seems once again the empirical one of
surveying the actual undertakings of finding such satisfying configura-
tions. James takes into consideration the strategies adopted by the most
important schools of philosophy and claims that they share an under-
lying assumption: they think that the solution to the casuistic ques-
tion can be resolved by reducing the varieties of goods claimed to some
more simple category, to be used for ranking them. James makes a quick
survey of the fortune of this method in the history of modern ethics,
and thus of the strategies adopted by its most distinguished philosoph-
ical traditions – variously advanced by intuitionism, consequentialism,
deontologism, divine law, and even Darwinism. He finds, however, that
their respective solutions are rather unsatisfying because they all refer
to a sole abstract moral principle that clashes with our experience of
a plurality of values and lifestyles, which these solutions are unable to
account for. The various moral sources populating our moral life can
barely accept the existence of a single system of evaluation able to
account for and make justice to all these moral stances without slashing
their requests and best promises.
James thus admits that any overarching normative principle, because
of generality, might well accept virtually each claim and its opposite,
thus proving unhelpful in addressing such conflicts:
After all, in seeking for a universal principle we inevitably are carried

onward to the most universal principle – that the essence of good is
simply to satisfy demand. The demand may be for anything under the
sun. The elementary forces in ethics are probably as plural as those
of physics are. The various ideals have no common character apart
from the fact that they are ideals. No single abstract principle can be
so used as to yield to the philosopher anything like a scientifically
accurate and genuinely useful casuistic scale. (153)
James claims that a way out of the casuistic dilemma can be envisioned
only by getting rid of this image of morality as struggling for an abstract
principle of goodness that moral theories variously claim to champion.

We shall in fact realize that in our ethical republic there is “always a
pinch between the ideal and the actual which can be got through by
leaving part of the ideal behind.” Once again, James presents us with
a problem that affects us in our double role of moral philosophers and
ordinary individuals, whose moral life can be enlightened or frustrated
by moral reflection. The problematic situation that the moral philoso-
pher is addressing involves us as ordinary beings engaged in our moral
lives, since such difficulties are the ones that we encounter when we do
reflect on ethics in a certain way. Moral reflection should survey such
difficulties and possibly show us a way out of them, a solution which is
very often overlooked because of our temptation to project on it intellec-
tualistic requirements, and should thus be rediscovered or re-enhanced
by a careful critical observation of our ordinary moral practices.
Given the multiplicity of claims demanded in our pluralistic socie-
ties, and abandoning the pretense to fund ethics on some principles
governing our moral practices from the above of their contingencies,
the most acceptable moral principle available seems to be that of satis-
fying the most number of demands at the least cost. It is thus in this
context that James advances what is usually taken as a consequentialist
principle of preference maximization, which, uncritically read, has been
presented as James’s grounding moral principle.24 However, if we pay
attention to the way in which James presents this “solution,” as well
as to the considerations following its formulation, we can appreciate
the exhortative (rather than prescriptive) register at play in the dialectic
of the text. In fact, this consequentialist-inspired conclusion seems
for James yet another dead end as an answer to the casuistic question –
following the luck of the other aforementioned normative principles –
unless we characterize what kind of moral principle it provides us with,
and most importantly how to engage and use it. James writes:
Since everything which is demanded is by that fact a good, must

not the guiding principles for ethical philosophy (since all demands
conjointly cannot be satisfied in this poor world) be simply to satisfy
at all times as many demands as we can? That act must be the best act,
accordingly which makes for the best whole in the sense of awakening
the least sum of dissatisfaction. In the casuistic scale, therefore, those
ideals must be written highest which prevail at the least cost, or by
whose realization the least possible number are destroyed. (155)
This answer to moral conflicts has without doubt a consequentialist

flavor in its suggestion to pay attention and consider the consequences
of adopting a certain moral ideal or satisfying a certain claim in our

moral evaluations. However, what has been surprisingly overlooked by
the literature is that this principle is presented by James as a practical
possibility that is up to us to explore, and not as an already settled solu-
tion to the casuistic problem. James does not tell us to passively accept
this principle, which in its most abstract formulation is in fact of little
help in practical matters because of its generality. Rather, he invites us
to explore its possibilities of actualization.
The character of the dialectic, and thus of the principle itself, is horta-
tory because James is inviting us to do something with it. James’s sugges-
tion is that we have to rethink our relationship with this moral principle
as an inventive and engaged one, in which the truth of our moral ideals
and claims is established by inventing new conditions for their actual
realization:
The course of history is nothing but the story of men’s struggles from
generation to generation to find more and more inclusive order. Invent
some manner of realizing your own ideals which will also satisfy the
alien demands – that and that only is the path of peace! Following
this path, society has shaken into one sort of relative equilibrium
after another by a series of social discoveries quite analogous to those
of science. (155–6)
This exhortative formulation changes dramatically the shape and alleged

content of James’s discussion of the casuistic question. According to
James ethics requires experimentions, and like physical science it has an
a posteriori character. However, unlike scientific ones, moral experiments
involve an exercise of the self on the self, in which what is at stake
is the way in which we problematize the relationship which we have
with our own moral principles. What matters, from an ethical point of
view in the formation of our moral ideas, is precisely the way in which
our interiority responds to their emergence or decline. Moral progress
has thus the form of a personal transformation of the way in which
we portray and live with our moral principles, which we can question
in the measure to which they frustrate or augment our dearest ideals.
Principles should in fact express our subjectivities, not suppress their
possibilities by dictating how to behave in given situations.
According to James, in order to escape the difficulties facing those
accounts seeking the essence of the good, ethical experimentations with
our moral principles should have an inventive and explorative character.
Such experiments “are to be judged, not a priori, but by actually finding,
after the fact of their making, how much more outcry or how much
appeasement comes about.” The inventive experimentations require a

work on the self that consists, among other things, in the willingness
to change one’s perspective and the capacity to renegotiate what would
count as genuine moral progress, and in which active tension featuring
the establishment of one’s ideals is given prominence as a chief moral
criterion.
James brings as examples of such moral revolutions of the self the
most important social and individual moral achievements obtained
through inventive experimentations, such as the abolition of oppres-
sive institutions and the overthrowing of political orders. However,
considering the task of moral philosophy to be accomplished with
the attainment of such results – that is, equating moral reflection
so conceived with the mere registration of such personal and social
achievements – would mean deflecting the dialectic of the essay, and
most importantly betraying James’s message. James is in fact exhorting
us not to represent those ideals often obtained with great effort and
by means of profound ruptures, as definitive, and thus crystallized in
a background of shared values and principles. This would in fact mean
to keep open the possibility which alienates our expressive capacities
typical of moral dogmatism; only this time articulated under the rubric
of the tyranny of one’s acquired habits. It would, in other words, mean
substituting an a priori picture of principles with an a posteriori one that
would, however, share with it a deadening picture of our relationship
with such principles.
According to James there are in fact a series of impediments that
hinder us from establishing a healthy relationship with our moral prin-
ciples, and thus achieving the ethical republic the philosopher strives
for as well. He writes:
We are blinded to the real difficulty of the philosopher’s task by the

fact that we are born into a society whose ideals are largely ordered
already. If we follow the ideal which is conventionally highest, the
others which we butcher, either die and do not return to haunt us; or
if they come back and accuse us of murder, everyone applauds us for
turning to them a deaf ear. In other words, our environment encour-
ages us not to be philosophers but partisans. (154)
James emphasizes the personal pronoun “we” in order to underline the

contiguity between the ordinary and the philosophical difficulty and
temptation to the casuistic problem. These difficulties and temptations
of our everyday moral life challenge the fallacious and misleading

assumption that moral reflection should refer in its task to the society
in which values and ideals are “largely ordered already.” Moral reflec-
tion would in this case perpetuate the moral conservatism of society
and hinder the critical exercise of our moral sensibilities in breaking the
spell. If thus moral reflection should resist the temptation to impose an
idea of perfection on the moral life disregardful of its inner complexity
to its inner dynamics, neither should it fall in the opposite extreme
of a strenuous defense of the status quo and thus of its entrenched
evaluations and conducts. James warns us of the moralistic drifts that
ethics might take when we imagine its contribution to the moral life
in such foundational terms. James describes moralism as that attitude
leading to the “mutilation of the fullness of the truth,” attempting to
impose the shape that our ideals and conducts should take in order to
be considered as moral by either referring to some ideal order or to the
established one.
Moral principles, when portrayed as the outcome of a society whose
values are already established and not negotiated any more, lead to
moralism and conservatism, which are two expression of the very same
intellectualistic and foundational conception of morality which James is
encouraging us to resist. By inviting us to entertain an inventive relation-
ship with our moral principles, James depicts ethical experimentations as
those exercises whose point is to comprehend whether one’s own judg-
ments and conduct are expressive or not of one’s subjectivity. Those exper-
imentations involve a work on the self which consists among other things
in the ongoing renegotiation of our willingness to keep alive the tentative
character and expressive force featuring the principles we live by. James
writes:
All this amounts to saying that, so far as the casuistic question goes,
ethical science is just like physical science, and instead of being deduc-
ible all at once from abstract principles, must simply bide its time,
and be ready to revise its conclusions from day to day. The presump-
tion ... always is that the vulgarly accepted opinions are true, and the
right casuistic order that which public opinion believes ... Every now
and then, however, someone is born with the right to be original, and
his revolutionary thought or action may bear prosperous fruits ... He
may, by breaking old moral rules in a certain practice, bring in a total
condition of things more ideal than would have followed had the
rules been kept. (157–8)
James elaborates here the intuition about the inventive and revolu-
tionary picture of moral ideas that he presented in the context of the
discussion of the psychological question of ethics, where he wrote:
All the higher, more penetrating ideals are revolutionary. They

present themselves far less in the guise of effects of past experience
than in that of probable causes of future experience, factors to which
the environment and the lessons it has so far taught us must learn to
bend. (144)
The generative and inventive stance of ethical choices is contrasted by

James with the dogmatic and conservative approach of theories which
promise a secure foundation for moral practice, but frequently represent
instead the foremost cause of trouble and frustration.
James thus emphasizes the novel character of moral ideals, and praises
the proactive attitude which one should assume with regards to one’s
own principles in order to avoid their growing too stiff around our
subjectivities – thus mortifying their originalities. James writes:
In point of fact, there are no absolute evils, and there are no non-
moral goods; and [t]he highest ethical life – however few may be called
to bear its burden – consists at all times in the breaking of rules which
have grown too narrow for the actual case. (158)
The moral life is articulated along moments of critique and rupture with
established experiences and ideas, as there are no goods that in principle
could not turn out to be morally relevant. James’s emphasis here is on
the novelty of our moral ideals, which he pictures as the active stance
that the subject entertaining them should take on her experiences. In
this context James forcefully restates that “no philosophy of ethics is
possible in the old-fashioned absolute sense of the term” because “every-
where the ethical philosopher should wait on facts,” and criticizes the
“intuitional moralists” for their pretence to force this inviolable prin-
ciple by suggesting absolute moral categories that either make reference
to ideal or customary orders. The inventive and generative attitude is
thus opposed to the dogmatic and conservative one that often ethical
thinkers, and us with them, embraced by building moral theories beyond
which barricading in the hope (or with the promise) of a stable founda-
tion of our moral practices, but which often represented the first cause
of frustration for their flourishing.
It is important to notice that James’s claim that novelty and invention

lie at the bottom of one’s ethical life is not presented as an innate feature
of our human nature, but rather as the fallout of the description of our
moral life as an inventive practice in which the establishment of moral
truths depends on the exercise of our sensibilities against the subscrip-
tion of values and principles established independently from it. The
underlying philosophical anthropology would thus be a pragmatic one,
emphasizing our ways of involvement with the truths that we live by
and the experiences we waive together in practical terms. The language
and dialectics with which James presents this alternative picture of
moral reflection closely follows the ones through which he presents his
pragmatic conception of truth, and in the fourth chapter, after having
presented at some detail the pragmatic anthropology in which James
inscribes these reflections on ethics (in Ch. 3), I shall examine the details
of such understanding of truth and its bearings for ethics.
The life with/of moral principles
By characterizing our higher ethical life as one which calls on us to

break those principles which represent the biggest impediment to one’s
personal edification, James establishes a robust connection between the
way in which we portray our life with the principles we live by and their
moral legitimacy. According to James moral reflection should not aim
at a theoretical justification of our moral principles, but it should rather
critically examine our personal stances and attitudes toward them. Colin
Koopman voices this concern when he writes that:
Modern philosophy always assumed that the moral life would neces-
sarily flow from the correct moral principles ... But the great unexplored
assumption behind this approach was that ethical living is better served
by demonstration of necessities than by affirmation of contingency
and provocations to perfectibility. (Koopman 2009: 155–6)
In “Moral Philosopher” James invites us to reflect on the rich modality

of responses which we should cultivate in respect to the moral principles
and values we live by: for example, by imagining alternative conducts
which might honor them and at the same time widen them, so to
augment our possibility of self-expression through them.
Changing the scope of moral reflection, whose register should be
exhortative rather than prescriptive, importantly changes the kind of
philosophical writing most suitable for conveying them. James claims in

fact that the function of the moral philosopher should be similar to that
of the good statesman or educator, and thus her way of writing should
adjust accordingly. He writes:
Books on ethics, therefore, so far as they truly touch the moral life,
must more and more ally themselves with a literature which is
confessedly tentative and suggestive rather than dogmatic – I mean
with novels and dramas of the deeper sort, with sermons, with books
on statecraft and philanthropy and social and economical reform.
Treated in this way ethical treatises may be voluminous and lumi-
nous as well; but they never can be final, except in their abstractest
and vaguest features; and they must more and more abandon the old-
fashioned, clear-cut, and would-be “scientific” form. (159)
This passage closely recalls James’s letter to his brother quoted at the
beginning of the chapter. The comparison between good moral philos-
ophy and good literature is directed toward inspiring our conduct by
inviting us to perpetually challenge our assumptions. The appreciation
of this hortatory register is fundamental for the understanding of the
underlying intentions of the essay. Read this way, “Moral Philosopher”
aspires to represent a new starting point in ethics understood and prac-
ticed as an activity of conceptual clarification and critique. James invites
us to rethink our expectations about the goals and stakes of moral reflec-
tion and abandon any foundational pretension. He is trying to change
our philosophical – and, most precisely, our ethical – sensibility and
expectations, in order to understand “how best to proceed in ethical
inquiry.”
From this perspective the goal of the essay, far from being that of
convincing us of any particular moral option, would be rather that of
dissuading us from representing the principles and rules governing our
moral life as independent from our ordinary moral practices. In the
reading of “Moral Philosopher” I sketched, such dissuasion is elaborated
through the critique of moral theories, and the companion defense of a
new hortatory course for moral reflection that would get rid of prescrip-
tive ambitions and focus on the elucidation of the complexities and
shortcomings of the moral life. In respect to the first point, James is not
asking us to get rid of moral principles or rules (he writes, in fact, that
“abstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as
our intuitions are more piercing, and our vocation is stronger for the
moral life”), but rather to re-interpret them as possibilities for our moral
life: not their foundation and justification but rather our life with them
should be the focus of moral philosophy in its hortatory role.25
Regarding the second point, James stresses the radical intertwinement
between the figure of the moral philosopher and us ordinary beings as
reflective thinkers: his critiques and instructions to the former could be
food for thought for the latter as well. We find a last timely remark on
this promiscuity in the text, where James writes:
The ethical philosopher, therefore, whenever he ventures to say which

course of action is the best is on no essentially different level from
the common man. “See I have set before thee this day life and good,
and death and evil, therefore, choose life that thou and thy seed may
live,”-when this challenge comes to us, it is simply our character and
total personal genius that are on trial; and if we invoke any so-called
philosophy, our choice and use of that also are but revelations of our
individual aptitude or incapacity for moral life. From this unsparing
practical ordeal no professor’s lectures and no array of books can save
us. The solving word for the learned and the unlearned man alike lies,
in the last resort, in the dumb willingnesses and unwillingnesses of
their interiors, and nowhere else (162).
James emphasizes once more the overlap between the ordinary and the
reflective dimension involved in our moral inquiry, claiming that in the
choice and use of a certain philosophical line what is at stake is nothing
short of our very capacity to live a moral life. The distance between the
moral theorist’s way of understanding ethical inquiry and James’ has
been overlooked for too long, both by his interpreters and by the moral
philosophers who animated the debate in the long century that divides
us from his writings. The advantage that this perspective might bring to
our way of thinking and understanding philosophical ethics is for the
most part still to be explored.
The strenuous mood: an alternative reading of theological

and metaphysical assumptions
In this chapter I have tried to tell a fairly linear story about James’s
methodological approach to ethics in “Moral Philosopher,” showing
how from such a perspective most of the interpretative disagreements
over this text and the charges of inconsistencies it attracted might be
reconsidered and explained away. However, as in the best philosophical
and literary texts, there is always one piece missing or hardly matching.
This is a troubling piece I shall here attempt at finding or squaring,

which regards the reading of the last section of the essay, in which
metaphysical and religious considerations come to the fore.26 Three
main interpretations have been offered of this portion of the text: some
authors (most notably, Gale 1999 and 2005) read in it a radical change
of direction from the previous sections betraying once again James’s
dual self, promethean and mystical; others (most recently, Lekan 2007
and 2009) have denounced the tension between a naturalistic and a
religious outlook in James’s ethics, suggesting a way to disentangling the
two without severing either; still others (most forcefully, Slater 2007 and
2009) used this section as proof of the religious and metaphysical char-
acter of James’s ethics. Contrary to these reconstructions, I shall attempt
to make sense of this section by showing its consistency with the rest
of the essay, and in particular with the anti-prescriptivism animating
it, suggesting how the metaphysical and religious assumptions James is
interested in can be part of one’s ethical outlook without constituting
a necessary ingredient of it. Once again, my dissatisfaction with the
interpretations available has to do not so much with the details of their
reconstructions but rather with their very spirit.
In the opening of this part of the essay we find a statement that at
least at a first blush looks rather at odds with what James had stated in
the previous pages, where he forcefully argued for a re-transcendaliza-
tion of our moral philosophy. James states in fact that:
The chief of all the reasons why concrete ethics cannot be final is that
they have to wait on metaphysical and theological beliefs. (159)
In order to dissipate the suspicion of inconsistency we should read this

passage in the light of the dialectic of the entire essay, as its interpretation
out of context might easily lead us astray. After having argued several times
for the purely human dimension of moral reflection and the moral life,
making reference to metaphysical and theological beliefs as the center-
piece of concrete ethics might sound contradictory, to say the least. How
can ethics be both an a posteriori, secular enterprise, and have to wait on
metaphysical and theological considerations? Yet, if one is willing to pay
the necessary attention to the dialectic of the section, as well as to some
crucial statements, the apparent incongruence will be reabsorbed; further-
more, it will be reveal another aspect of his moral thought, only hinted at
in the essay, but that James develops at more length in other texts.27
One might begin by asking what exactly James meant by the line
quoted in the previous paragraph. I suggest to read the need of concrete
ethics to “wait on” metaphysical and theological beliefs as a synonym

for “taking into consideration” or “be mindful of” them rather than
“rest on” or “follow” them. While the former choices would suggest a
characterization of metaphysical and theological beliefs as aspects that
might feature our subjectivity as moral agents engaged in their choices
and evaluations – that is, as considerations we might weigh in the
process of assessing a moral view or fashioning an ethical conduct – the
latter choices suggest a characterization of metaphysical and theological
beliefs as criteria and necessary conditions for such activities – that is,
necessary elements that moral reflection needs to be considering when
assessing the moral life.
James helps us in this choice when soon after he writes that meta-
physical and theological beliefs and considerations are relevant for the
moral life in so much as they might engage the philosophical tempera-
ments and moral psychology of the subjects involved. The reference
here is to a practical difference between the various ways of facing the
moral life rather than to an ontological difference to the way the world
simply is:
The deepest difference, practically, in the moral life of man is the

difference between the easy-going and the strenuous mood. When
in the easy-going mood the shrinking from present ill is our ruling
consideration. The strenuous mood, on the contrary, makes us quite
indifferent to present ill, if only the greater ideal be attained. (159–60,
emphasis mine)
The context in which James speaks about metaphysical and theological

believes is thus that of the importance of our particular stance in the
moral life: a stance that can be either enhanced or weakened by a variety
of considerations, among which precisely are the metaphysical (who we
are) and the theological (the very scale of our existences). There would in
fact be for James a practical difference in approaching the moral life and
its burdens with an easy-going rather than a strenuous attitude; James
tells us that the capacity for the strenuous mood, while it “probably lies
slumbering in every man,” still “it has more difficulty in some than in
others in waking up” as in order to be triggered it requires some catalyst
that is hard to activate in a purely human world. As James writes, with
accustomed perspicuity:
It needs the wilder passions to arouse it, the big fears, loves, and
indignations; or else the deeply penetrating appeal of some one of
the higher fidelities, like justice, truth or freedom. Strong relief is

a necessity of its vision; and a world where all the mountains are
brought down and all the valleys are exalted is no congenial place for
its habitation. (160)
Metaphysical and religious beliefs might well represent for some people
precisely the peaks that the strenuous mood needs in order to be trig-
gered, and thus for the moral energies to be fully released. Even if such
a world without any higher entity is “a genuinely ethical symphony,”
still “it is played in the compass of a couple of poor octaves, and the
infinite scale of values fails to open up.” James is thus referring to our
ordinary attitudes and not to some alleged abstract requirement about
the way our moral life should be structured in order to qualify as such.
When, practically, we represent the world in which we advance our
moral claims as a finite universe then our conviction in sustaining such
claims could be diminished by the absence of an infinite dimension in
which “the scale of the symphony is incalculably prolonged.” When
such postulates are in place, instead, a whole new energy seems to be
available to us, altering our vision and reshaping the moral salience of
the situation:
The scale of the more imperative ideals now begin to speak with an
altogether new objectivity and significance, and to utter the pene-
trating, shattering, tragically challenging note of appeal ... Our attitude
towards concrete evils is entirely different in a world where we believe
there are none but finite demanders, from what it is in one where we
joyously face tragedy for an infinite demanders’ sake. (160–1)
James tackles here some themes that he will work out in detail in VRE,
in which we find it argued that in moral considerations a central role
is played by the personal attitude and mood of individuals in their
moral lives. In this work, the belief and commitment to the existence
of a divine dimension or harmony among things are not described as
either factual or abstract beliefs that can be ascertained or proved wrong
by either empirical evidences, or by making reference to some alleged
philosophical principle, precisely because they are the very conditions of
possibility for having such experiences or holding some philosophical
view. Their subscription might sensibly change the personal or philo-
sophical mood, and thus the psychological and energetic constitution
and arrangement, of the subjects whose life is informed and enlightened
by them (if it practically is).
In “Moral Philosopher” this scenario is functional to show how our

very personal dispositions and moods toward the principles and rules
we live by (or we want to challenge) change the way we describe the
world we live in. Our metaphysical and theological convictions reveal
constitutive aspects of our interiority which color our ways of relating to
the world and to the moral principles and rules we find in it; as such the
indexical character of such convictions is irremediably compromised
when they are stripped from our “dumbest inclinations and dislikes”
and described as substantive requirement of moral reflection. James’s
remarks are in this sense, and once again, utterly descriptive rather than
prescriptive. That is, James is not endorsing such beliefs in any way,
but rather he is depicting their consequence for those blessed by them:
metaphysical and theological considerations might well be necessary for
some in order to effectively engage in ethical conduct, but should not be
mandatory for us all.
There are a few remarks in the text that hint at such an interpreta-
tion. James observes that, when we imagine a world in which ideals are
ordered in a superior mind, we might be stimulated to take and endure
the strenuous mood necessary to keep a hold on the most difficult ideals
to reach or sustain. The more that he also comments how we would
be ready to postulate them even against the evidence of their grounds
because of the good they might do for us:
The capacity of the strenuous mood lies so deep down among our
natural human possibilities that even if there were no metaphysical
or traditional grounds for believing in a God, men would postulate
one simply as a pretext for living hard, and getting out of the game of
existence its keenest possibilities of zest. (161)
However, James nowhere claims that, from a philosophical point of

view, we ought to postulate such grounds or that we had better to, as he
is rather only registering what he takes to be a very general feature of
the way we face the world. Neither does he claim that a genuine moral
life is necessarily informed by such assumptions: he explicitly denies
this inference when he states that a genuine ethical symphony is well
granted in a purely human world. James is once again striving to illu-
minate our moral practices by depicting the many ways in which we
empirically lead our moral life rather than laying down philosophical
desiderata that should work for everybody. If there are any faults with
James’s practical diagnosis, they are descriptive shortcomings rather than
prescriptive ones.
These considerations lead to James’s “final conclusion” that we, as

would-be philosophers seeking final ethical resolution and unity, should
postulate a higher thinker “in the interest of our ideal of systematically
unified moral truth.” If the divine thinker exists, its choices would give
definitive validity to the casuistic scale: the universe would be the “most
inclusive realizable whole.” But, as James notes, this is Royce’s solu-
tion in The Religious Aspect of Philosophy rather than his own. Unlike
Royce, James is interested in such metaphysical and theological beliefs
because of the way they may touch our interiority as moral agents, and
not because he thinks them a necessary condition to enjoy a moral life
worth the name.
There is actually plenty of room, in James, to make nearly the oppo-
site claim – that a moral life lived strenuously without the aid of such
assumptions is even more valuable, from an ethical point of view, in that
it requires us to be stronger and braver in the face of no (such) external
support – a theme which James explores from multiple perspectives in
his psychological, epistemological, and practical writings. According to
James the moral philosopher should not be biased by such hypotheses,
but rather limit herself to registering them as themselves genuine aspects
and possibilities of our subjectivity which we might enact (hence cash
out) in practice or not. The pulsing heart of the moral life would thus lie
in our readiness to question our attitudes and moods and reshape them
in an unbroken exercise of the self on the self, no matter their source.
3
The Life of the Mind and the
Practices of the Self
In the discussion of “Moral Philosopher” I have mentioned the ethical

considerations and the considerations relevant for ethics featuring other
texts. This brings us to consider what kind of relationship runs between
such writings. Most commentators depict this relationship in founda-
tional terms: “Moral Philosopher” would contain James’s moral theory
that he then applied, more or less successfully and consistently, to the
resolutions of various ethical issues he tackles in the other writings.1
Having criticized the major premise of this inference – that is the pres-
ence of a moral theory in “Moral Philosopher” – I consequently resist
its conclusion about the foundational character of the relationship with
the other moral writings. If, as I have tried to show, there are grounds
to think that “Moral Philosopher” contains no moral theory, then there
would be no theoretical machinery James could have put to work in
his other writings. As I stated in the first chapter, we should be rather
drawing a non-foundational connection between these texts, based on
a certain insistence on some themes that he tackled from different angles
and with different intensities.
A more promising approach would thus be to characterize the differ-
ence between “Moral Philosopher” and the other texts as a division of
tasks. We can in fact read the former as containing the rough guidelines
and expressing the main concerns that would help us to understand
what is going on in the latter: how to read the moral ruminations and
concerns spreading in James’s writings. The relationship would hence be
one of contiguity within what I have claimed to be the therapeutic and
transformative theme informing James’s hortatory ethical register – and
not, to be sure, a sheer application or refinement of some moral princi-
ples allegedly stated in the former text.
117
In the previous chapters I started to survey the nature of these under-

lying themes constituting the distinctive metaphilosophical leitmotiv of
his investigations as well as James’s distinctive way of approaching them.
What in the first chapter I labeled as the “critical theme” informing
the dialectic of “Moral Philosopher,” characterized as anti-theoretical
and experimental, warns us from those attempts and temptations to
reduce ethics to the elaboration of a morality system of norms and rules
standing on their feet independently from the active and steadfast exer-
cise of our moral sensibilities. This theme is explored in original ways
in such later texts as “On A Certain Blindness In Human Beings” and
“What Makes a Life Significant,” in which James shows the difficulties
we encounter when we alienate our expressive capacities and our moral
sensibility to an impersonal gaze hiding ourselves from humanity (our
own as well as that of the other individuals), jeopardizing in this way
the very possibility of a genuine participation in the moral life. The goal
of this therapeutic analysis is that of freeing ourselves from such incli-
nations and superstitious views by means of a transformative process
that aims at the (re-)appreciation of our personal contribution to moral
reflection itself.
The positive theme suggested by this change of emphasis as well of
the direction of ethics that I have characterized, after James, as horta-
tory, discloses a way of rethinking moral reflection along non-founda-
tional lines. Ethics is hortatory in the measure in which it suggests ways
of rethinking the very relationship of moral reflection with an examined
moral life.
This theme is explored by James in PP and in TT, in which our author
presents the care for, and work on, the various aspects of our interi-
ority as activities directly relevant for the articulation of a moral philos-
ophy attentive and respectful of the various shades and overtones of
the moral life. In his writings on psychology James elaborates a picture
of the formation and care of the self that represents one of the most
interesting instances and expression of his radical conception of ethical
reflection. The therapeutic and transformative register of this hortatory
conception has furthermore various consequences in the way we portray
the various attitudes we might assume toward the world and our fellow
inhabitants.
This motif will be reprised and developed in P and MT, in which James
is interested in bringing our attention to the varieties of relationships
that we might entertain with the truths we live by at the heart of our
processes of experiencing and ways of world-making. In these writ-
ings James examines in depth the theme of the practical involvement
The Life of the Mind and the Practices of the Self 119
featuring the doing and undoing of experience, in which the hortatory

register is articulated in terms of the invitation to rethink of our very
practices of truth. Through a selective presentation of such writings – the
“psychological” ones in the present chapter and the “epistemological”
ones in the following one – I aim to show how the therapeutic and trans-
formative registers were explored by James in directions congenial to the
re-thinking of the very object and strategies of philosophical ethics. An
operation continuing in fifth chapter where I shall draw some further
considerations about James’s practical philosophy in the light of this
metaphilosophical conception of ethical activity.
Self-constitution as the subject matter of ethics
Given the therapeutic and transformative register informing James’s

moral writings it is no surprise that one of the chief and lasting themes
in his work is that of the care of the self as an activity of ethical signifi-
cance; an activity which, according to James, can take different forms
and courses, and which can thus be investigated from a multiplicity
of perspectives. In James’s diverse philosophical incursions there seems
to be, in fact, an unbroken stress on the agential point of view (vs. the
spectatorial one dear to the various forms of representationalism that
pragmatism fiercely resists) and its importance when facing our various
activities of self- and world-making. All these discourses and inquiries are
in fact characterized by an ethical purport, since in each of them what it
is at stake for James is some kind of conversion and attunement in the
way we see ourselves and the world as sources of meaning and value by
engaging in our human practices. The moral life is described by James as
a field for self-fashioning in which we challenge our entrenched views
and reactions, while moral investigation is understood as an inquiry
of the postures and stances that we might take toward ourselves and
the world.2 It is thus not an exaggeration to locate in James’s writings a
pragmatic version of the classical conception3 of self-cultivation as the
proper goal and mode of ethics.
A version of this theme has been in fact noticed by a number of
scholars, who offered an interpretation of his moral thought as a
progressive insistence on the themes of cultivating individuality and
recognizing diversity in our ordinary dealings with the world and our
fellow inhabitants. John Roth centered his reconstruction of James’s
moral thought on the idea of ethics being the acknowledgment of the
burdens of our freedom. Roth explicitly refuses to narrow down James’s
ethics to a defense of a moral theory, pointing rather to the richness
of his account of the moral self, engaged in the unceasing business of

making sense of itself and of reality. Roth writes:
While James was greatly interested in ethical questions, he never

developed a fully systematic ethical theory. He was more interested in
describing a general ethical stance toward existence than in developing
a system of rules or virtues. (Roth 1965: 13, emphasis mine)
For Roth, in order to appreciate James’s contribution to ethics we should

be looking into his analysis of the various ways in which we consti-
tute ourselves in the course of experience, offering the two keys of the
struggle with freedom and the search for psychological unity as the phil-
osophical lines along which James would have explored this focal task
of the moral life. More than in the details of this interpretation, which
as other commentators noticed as well pays the existentialist meta-
physical climate of the time,4 I am interested in stressing how the non-
foundational readings of James’s ethics, such as Roth’s, are much more
sensible to his elaborate reflection on the notion of self-constitution as
the centerpiece of moral concern.
Franzese, despite offering a quite different interpretation more oriented
toward an original philosophical Darwinization of James, shares with
Roth a similar attention to James’s distinctive philosophical anthro-
pology and its ethical dimension. Franzese places James’s ethics in the
wider context of a post-Darwinian and Lotzian approach to the “anthro-
pological question,” according to which “ethics allies with physiology in
showing the way to the good life, which consists above all in a well struc-
tured and well disposed personality,” where “the construction of person-
ality is a discipline, a matter of exercise and repetition” (Franzese 2008:
129–30). Despite their differences, both approaches end up pointing to
our alleged metaphysical constitution (variously characterized) as a foun-
dation of our moral life, at the cost of overlooking James’s remark about
our self-constitution being a practical possibility that we should commit
to, and as such representing the chief ethical exercise and practice. In my
reading, the cultivation of the self (that is, its perfectibility and progres-
siveness), and not the self as a given (no matter how much indeterminate
or dynamic we portray its nature), is the focus of James’s concern.
Mark Uffelman explicitly label James’s approach as an “ethics of
self-cultivation,” in which individuals strive for their improvement by
“forging their self in the stream of experience.” James’s technical word
for this task is meliorism, which refers to the attitude and orientation
toward the possibility to improve one’s self and the world by means of
one’s commitments and personal experimentations (neither we or the

world are good or bad per se, but rather it is up to us to ameliorate it
through our affirmative deeds and attitudes). Uffelman writes that this
ethics of self-cultivation is:
An extension of the melioristic orientation of classical pragmatism

to the care and growth of the self ... Practically, this involves selecting
avenues of growth through the development of attitudes, practices,
and habits that are constitutive of improved experience and conduc-
tive to future improvement. (Uffelman 2004: 320)
According to this reading James would have thus centered his ethics on
the theme of self-cultivation as an activity of moral significance; such a
theme can be detected in his writings on psychology, as well as those on
pragmatism, in which James explores our practices of truth in terms of
activities of experimentation with the world.
This is also the moving theme of Albrecht’s chapter on James in his
excellent book on individualism, where the author presents the details
of James’s psychological writings as the groundwork of such ethical
approach. The depiction of the various ways in which we can constitute
as selves would in fact reveal the moving theme of James’s moral writings,
in which what is underlined and remarked are the ways that, by facing
uncertain and constitutively misleading situations, we are deciding what
kind of individuals we want to be. The idea animating this approach is
the plasticity and transformational capacity of the self, that makes self-
edification possible and through which we enrich our capacity for expe-
rience and widen our possibilities of meaningful conduct. If, as Dewey
puts it, “morals means growth of conduct in meaning” (Dewey 1983:
194), then, for James, such growth is first and foremost a personal one
in which what is at stake is a process of education of the self through its
practices and unbroken training. Albrecht argues about the “crucial role
that individuality plays in the creation of moral value,” noticing how:
James insists that in remaking our circumstances we remake ourselves,

that we redirect and strengthen the quality of our character as we
devote our activity toward realizing an ideal: our “acts” are “turn-
ing-places” where we not only help the world grow, but “seem to
ourselves to make ourselves and grow.” (Albrecht 2012: 178)5
Given this wealth of moral considerations in James’s psychological

work, I shall now turn to PP (and corollary writings) in order to spell out
in some detail this picture of ethics as a striving for self-constitution. In

particular, I am interested in stressing how, in his psychological work,
James depicts the care of the self as an activity of chief moral signifi-
cance without either positing any substantial notion of personhood or
committing to any foundational project in philosophical anthropology.
Rather, it is my contention that in these texts James depicted ethics as
the critical investigation of a human possibility, resulting from work on
the self rather than as the ratification of our alleged metaphysical human
nature governing our moral fates.
The Principles of Psychology as a philosophical text

and its moral purport
The presence of moral considerations in PP has been variously docu-

mented, and yet it is difficult to characterize in detail. There have been
diverse reconstructions of this putative morality, and while only in
some cases has it been analyzed by taking into consideration James’s
other moral writings, James’s morality has rarely been inscribed in the
wider discourse of the hortatory character of ethics. As I shall argue, the
capacity to appreciate the therapeutic and transformative register of the
moral considerations suffusing PP is connected with the kind of reading
we give the text as a philosophical work. In particular, whereas the
various reconstructions related this text to James’s ethics in its presenta-
tion of the constitutive elements of the moral life, according to my reading
in PP James would rather depict the reflective work on them necessary
for for the flourishing of the moral life, which amounts to a full-fledged
philosophical account. PP is thus a fundamental passage for the exami-
nation and comprehension of James’s moral thought, along the lines
I am suggesting: that is, as a reflective inquiry of the shape, goals and
philosophical investigation of the moral life.
Despite its well-known self-proclaimed positivistic intents, according
to which he “[has] kept close to the point of view of natural science
throughout the book,” PP represents James’s most elaborate attempt to
bring together an impressive number of psychological, philosophical
and personal “descriptive details” on what could be broadly character-
ized as our life of the mind. In it we can find together the seeds of that
pragmatic method that James kept elaborating in the course of his entire
intellectual biography, in which descriptions, provocations and original
insights are blended together. In PP James looks at the various aspects
of our life of the mind from the point of view of their use, and invites
us to notice the variety of moral considerations at play when we look at
them in this way. He in fact claims that the analysis of our psychology
and its various aspects would be conducted from the point of view of
their activity, because a good description of our interiority should be
conducted from the point of view of its practical exercise.
James individuates in this way the contribution of psychology to
ethics in its characterization of the engaged and dynamic nature of the
relationship that human beings might entertain with their subjectivity:
the pragmatic descriptions of the various aspects of our life of the mind
disseminated in the dialectic of PP show the moral importance of the
dynamic and engaged attitude we might entertain with ourselves. This
way of presenting psychology as an inquiry directly relevant to ethics
brings to light a picture of moral reflection whose object is what human
beings might make of those aspects of their interiority that bring them
in a certain relationship with themselves.
If one gives up a detached, third-personal description of the various
aspects of our subjectivity in favor of an engaged, first-personal one, then
one can allow a different picture of the kind of psychological considera-
tions we find relevant to ethics. In fact, from this perspective the various
aspects of our subjectivity are presented from the point of view of their
use, and not as mere data on which an ethical theory should build a
morality system. Ethics would be intertwined with psychology because
it deals with the way in which we perceive and describe ourselves, and
with the kind of stance we can assume in respect to our very subjec-
tivity. To register something as moral requires in the first place the
acknowledgment of one’s subjectivity as the source and primary target
of moral experimentations, the seat of our character and its possibility
of progressing through experiencing.
Once he has discarded the idea of conceiving ethics as the advance-
ment of moral theories, James rethinks its reflective credentials by
presenting ethics as an account of the various stances and attitudes
we might take toward ourselves and our experiences altogether. If we
remove this personal dimension of subjectivity and treat human beings
as external observers of their mental lives, then the role of psychology
in ethics becomes foundational; if one takes into account the active role
of subjects in their subjectivities, it becomes clear that psychological
descriptions are already morally suffused.
The reading I defend in this chapter holds that, for James, psycho-
logical descriptions are relevant for ethics neither because they give us a
metaphysical image of human nature on which building a moral theory
(as the rationalists of his time claimed), nor because they tell us which
are the distinctive empirical traits of the moral subject (as the empiricists
believed), but rather because they point us to those aspects of our subjec-
tivity whose valorization or mortification is directly relevant for our
moral life. Philosophical psychology, understood in this way, invites us
to pay attention to the way we portray the various aspects of our interi-
ority as morally important. The way in which such attention is relevant
for ethics will be clarified later when analyzing in detail the passages in
which such characterization surfaces. James’s radicalization of empiri-
cism consists in the passage from the individuation of the single aspects
of our interiority that are relevant for ethics – i.e. sentiments or habit –
to the emphasis on the kind of attention and care that we should dedi-
cate to the nurture of such aspects. James individuates the contribution
of psychology to ethics in its characterization of the active and dynamic
nature of the relationship human beings might establish with their own
interiority.
The pragmatic descriptions of the various aspects of our life of
the mind that we find in PP show us the ethical importance of an
engaged posture we might assume towards its various aspects. Instead
of conceiving morality as pure from human involvement, or shaping
it after a metaphysical picture of human beings, the pragmatist envi-
sions a radical alternative: James invites us to regard ethical reflection
as informed by a peculiar kind of anthropological description: namely,
a description portraying human beings neither as they are nor as they
should be, but rather from the point of view of what they might make of
themselves. The investigation of such pragmatic descriptions could bring
about some conceptual re-definitions of both ethics and anthropology.
This reading seems consistent with Koopman’s reconstruction of James’s
moral psychology. Koopman writes that:
There are important ethical resources to be found in James’s psycholog-

ical writings and that the ethical resources featured in his more explic-
itly moral essays ought to be read in conjunction with the categories
established in James’s contributions to moral psychology ... James in
his contributions to both naturalistic moral psychology and hortatory
personal ethics is engaged in working out a conception of freedom as
a self-transformative practice. (Koopman forthcoming: 2–3)
Pragmatic philosophical psychology depicts human beings as moral

agents constantly engaged in monitoring and improving their faculties.
Consistently, the object of moral reflection becomes what human beings
might make of themselves by engaging in a certain relationship with
their life of the mind. Koopman calls these exercises and possibilities
“practices of freedom,” in which freedom itself is treated as a value and

the goal of ethics is some kind of self-transformation. I agree with this
account, and add that James explores this possibility, not only in respect
to the most elaborate psychological traits – such as the will – but also in
regard to all the aspects of our life of the mind that we can rethink and
rework so as to shape our self in a certain way.
The philosophical cipher and leitmotiv underlying the Jamesian
conception of the relationship between ethics and psychology would
thus be the following: James presents the moral dimension of some
aspects of our subjectivity in connection with the kind of attitude and
disposition that we might assume toward them. In this context, James
re-interprets the descriptions of our mental life offered by the empiri-
cists: he does not so much criticize the choice of the relevant aspects of
our mental life on which such tradition focused its inquiries (as we shall
see, he will reprise and comment large portions of the psychological
works by Mill and Bain, with whom he partnered against the ration-
alistic offensive of the time), but rather the way in which the empiri-
cists understood the relevance of their analyses for ethics. According to
James, these authors often ignored the dynamic character of the rela-
tionship between such aspects of our interiority and the use we make of
them, picturing them as given and not as achievements.
The picture James is opposing is the one of the life of the mind as
a mechanical application of psychological law inducing us to respond
in determined ways in presence of the external pertinent stimuli. This
picture, besides mortifying the richness of attitudes we might have in
respect to the various aspects of our subjectivity, tends to distort their
very nature by representing them as brute data and not as themselves
the result of a certain work on ourselves. According to James there is a
dynamic tension internal to our subjectivity, between its various aspects
and their uses, that is relevant to ethics; by missing such tension, the
descriptions of our mental lives offered by classical empiricism and
rationalism are equally unsatisfying by James’s lights.6
James unstiffened and redesigned the boundaries between disciplines7
(psychology and philosophy in the case at hand), and practiced philo-
sophical psychology in a manner that was at once empirically informed
and yet infused by a distinctive philosophical vision. The normative
moral descriptions of our subjectivity sketched in PP express a precise
philosophical line conveying James’s understanding of human nature
as something to be ascertained and crafted at the same time. In PP
the psychological inquiries are thus intertwined with the philosoph-
ical investigations in a way that complicates any clear-cut distinction
between the descriptive and the normative, between the explanatory

and the inventive. James’s work in and on psychology is at the same
time philosophical – that is, utterly explanatory and conceptual – and
scientific – that is, descriptive and empirically grounded. That PP was
not as much a “Lehrbuch,” that is a work of (psychological) doctrine, but
rather an imaginative investigation of various aspects of our inner life
is confirmed by James himself in a passage from a letter to his editor,
Holt, accompanying the manuscript of PP, in which he states that “there
is no such thing as a science of psychology” (C3: 294). PP was indeed
something else (and much more) than a scientific treatise or a merely
descriptive report of the mental life: in it James struggled to present an
enriched picture of how we might proceed in a philosophical (that is,
reflective) analysis of the modes and ways in which we shape our mind-
edness and worldliness.8
Psychology and the work of the self on the self
James conceived psychological states as directly relevant to a subject’s

articulation of their moral life. His philosophy of psychology was imbued
with ethical considerations as he conceived the analysis of mind as the
clarification and assessment of our cognitive and affective life for its crit-
ical improvement. By investigating the nature of our life of the mind we
attain a clearer picture of ourselves and a better grasp of the character of
experiencing. The moral considerations that we find suffused in PP are,
in fact, invitations to take care and pay attention to the various aspects
of our life of the mind, of which James presents the potentialities as well
as the dangerous shortcomings.
The philosophical anthropology underlying the relationship between
ethics and psychology that James resists, characterizes human beings as
mere spectators: moved to act morally because compelled by the obser-
vation of some moral principle whose justification does not involve the
exercise of their sensibility. James wants to show how another picture of
the relationship between ethics and psychology is possible and desirable.
According to this alternative picture, philosophical psychology refers
to a pragmatic anthropology, depicting human beings as the creators,
not mere witnesses, of their moral lives. This way of characterizing the
practical nature of human beings – as makers and not mere spectators of
their moral fates – suggests in its turn an alternative conception of the
scopes and strategies of moral philosophy, as well as of its relationship
with philosophical psychology. From this perspective ethics emerges from
pragmatic description of human beings – in the midst of their ordinary
practices of self- and world-making – without being derived either from

the analysis of their sheer factual constitution or by making reference to
the brute or supernatural world in which human beings inscribe their
activities.
This way of framing the issue has promising consequences on the way
of understanding, coping with, and possibly getting rid of the deeply
rooted problem of relating psychology to ethical reflection, a problem
featuring in various ways the whole history of moral philosophy. It
is usually assumed that what psychology gives us is a factual descrip-
tion of human beings, while ethics deals with normative notions such
as duty, imperatives and principles. Psychology tells us what there is,
while ethics – very roughly – describes what there should be. According
to the widely accepted view defended by those ethical theories firmly
working under the spell of the is – ought gap and the taunting menace
of the naturalistic fallacy (intuitionism, emotivism, and logical prescrip-
tivism being the most influential contemporary positions), by merely
describing how human beings are we cannot derive any information
that is relevant to ethics, if not by pointing out those very features of
human beings are whose development would amount to the realization
of a certain moral principle. In this picture ethics can profit from
psychological considerations, but only in an external way: that is by
picking from it some materials and arrange them according to its own
normative principles.
This move has been made also by the most attentive thinkers trying
to integrate their ethics with the descriptive details of psychology (that
is, by naturalists of various sorts, who rose to prominence in the second
half of the twentieth century as a reaction to the above-mentioned anti-
naturalists positions). I am here claiming, with James, that enriching
our descriptions of human beings is a necessary but not sufficient step
to integrate psychological considerations with ethical ones, unless we
resist the temptation to treat the former as mere data of which the latter
would build its own system regardless of the point of view and inventive
contribution of those involved with it.
Pragmatism, as exemplified by James in PP, refutes the terms of
the debate suggesting the possibility of a (pragmatic) description of
human beings that is already ethically relevant because it refers to the
self’s possibilities of self-experimentation and self-transformation, and
not because it either refers (even if only an implicit one) to a moral
principle or because it claims that whatever human beings do would
count ipso facto as a move in the moral space. In PP, James presents a
great variety of aspects of our mental life from the point of view of the
subjects experiencing, cultivating, and expressing them. This characteri-

zation of the way philosophical psychology is relevant for ethics can be
labeled as pragmatic: in this sense it renounces the dichotomy between
the nature and limitations of our psychology and the values and norms
of ethics. A similar characterization of the relationship between ethics
and psychology was explored by Kant in his Anthropologie in pragmatischer
Hinsicht, a text James read avidly as a young scholar. Despite the philo-
sophical distance between the two thinkers, for both Kant and James the
adjective pragmatic characterizes anthropology, not as a scholastic (and
thus theoretical) pursuit, but rather as a kind of practical inquiry, through
which human beings take care of themselves in their possibilities of
knowledge and conduct. Pragmatic anthropology depicts human beings
as agents constantly engaged in improving their faculties with some goal
of excellence in view: a goal which is not fixed by some principle or norm,
ruling our behavior from outside, but rather negotiated each time reality
grabs our philosophical – which is to say, critical – gaze.9
The pragmatic descriptions of our (Kantian) faculties or (Jamesian)
mental activities, in terms of what they allow us to think and do, enable
us to deepen our comprehension and capacity to having experiences –
and in particular moral ones, in which what is at stake is the establish-
ment of meaningful relationships with ourselves and our peers (as well
as our fellow non-human creatures and the natural world). There is thus
a sense in which experience and mindfulness10 are activities of ethical
importance themselves, since they relate to the improvement of our
subjectivity on encountering reality and investing it with meaning.
According to this picture, the object and goal of moral reflection is to
discover what human beings make of themselves by engaging in a certain
relationship with their life of the mind – that is, with their concepts and
experiences. This characterization stands at the heart of the project of PP,
and makes it possible to read the text in a new light. Unlike Kant, James
talks about mental activity, discarding altogether the language of mental
faculty, still appreciable in his Anthropologie (though quite different in
kind from the major Critical writings). As is his wont, James character-
izes mental excellence as the capacity to explore and deepen our subjec-
tivity by pursuing interests shaping it at a certain stage of our life. In
order to evaluate if a certain mental activity is adequate, and thus if the
experience to which it leads is appropriate, we should look at the kind
of relationship we entertain with such activity and experience, which
reveals our individual point of view on a particular situation. Once he
has dismissed the possibility of moral reflection as the advancement of
moral theory which makes no reference to our moral constitution, or
depicts the latter as merely supervening on the former, James charac-

terizes the relationship between ethics and philosophical anthropology
in terms of the various normative moral descriptions of the ways in
which we take care of ourselves. The notion of human being, and the
human perspective embedded in it, can be fruitfully relevant to ethics
if we avoid concentrating on what human beings are or should be, and
instead investigate what they might do of themselves.
From such a perspective we can uncover a space for subjectivity that
is the outcome of work on ourselves, which seeks to cultivate one’s
sensibility and attentiveness to the richness and thickness of experience
toward, which we had previously been morally blind and unreflective.
James shows a way in which this option can be articulated: by giving
a pragmatic description of the stance we might take in the investiga-
tion of our cognitive as well as affective life, he suggests a pragmatic
route which explains the importance of philosophical psychology for
the understanding and articulation of our moral life.
This way of presenting psychology – as an inquiry that is descriptive
and yet morally relevant – brings to light an image of ethics focused on
what the self makes of herself through engaging in a certain relation to
herself. This means refusing to ground ethics in a once-and-for-all given
conception of human nature without renouncing the idea that ethics
has a certain shape as it expresses a human possibility: a shape which is
related to the practices of the self on the self. James points towards a way
in which this alternative option can be articulated. By giving a pragmatic
description of the stance we might take in the investigation of our cogni-
tive and affective life James suggests a picture of ethics as anthropology.
The cornerstone of James’s pragmatic anthropology is a conception of
human beings as makers and not mere spectators of their life of the
mind. Now this is not only true for complex activities, but also for basic
ones, which we often disregard by labeling them as merely mechanical,
but whose moral potentiality is of the utmost importance because they
are the most defining characters and aspects of our subjectivity.
The moral life of the mind
The center of my inquiry in this chapter is the place of psychology in

James’s moral philosophy, and, more specifically, in which way philosoph-
ical psychology might be relevant to ethics. In this book we can appre-
ciate a plurality of voices expressing diverse moral considerations resisting
any univocal, substantive characterization of the contours of ethics.
However, if the reconstruction I am offering works, this is not surprising
and should be rather consistent with the overall reading of James’s ethics
here defended. If in fact, as James claims, the relationship between moral
reflection and moral life should not be foundational in character, then
neither should the connection between philosophical psychology and
ethics. PP’s guiding leitmotiv has rather to be found in its therapeutic prob-
lematization of certain tendencies and assumptions about our life of the
mind and the moral significance of our stance and attitude to that life.
According to James moral reflection should invite us to question
the very foundations of our moral practices by describing the way
and the conditions in which we accept or refute them: for example,
by acknowledging their personal dimensions, or rather denouncing the
way in which they alienate us. In this work the emphasis is on the ways
in which we take care of the various aspects of our subjectivity, thus
opening new possibilities for meaningful moral practices. The pragmatic
psychology delineated in PP offers us a great variety of these kinds of
exhortation, thus hinting at a non-foundational model for considering
moral reflection. By use of impressionist normative moral descriptions,
pragmatic psychology suggests a way in which moral reflection and the
moral life might enter into fruitful dialogue.
In this spirit, we can read PP as an exhibition of a great variety of
ways in which our subjectivity encounters the world in experiencing,
fashioning itself accordingly. Secondary literature has seldom recog-
nized the importance of this aspect of the text for the comprehension
of the Jamesian project of a pragmatic anthropology, and yet it has been
too selective in its focus on those chapters in which James presents the
stream of thought and the consciousness of the self.11 Far from denying
the great importance of these chapters for this project, I am interested in
showing how the very same dialectics is fully in play in the discussion
of the (apparently) most simple psychological aspects such as sensations
and perceptions, as well as in the (apparently) most complex ones such
as belief and will, whose workings closely recall an agential language
of experience and conduct. All these various aspects, rather than being
portrayed by James as mere brute facts or features of human nature, are
depicted from the point of view of the use we make of them, and thus
as themselves facets of our life of the mind which we should cultivate
and criticize.
Habit between expression and exhaustion
The discussion of habit in the fourth chapter of PP can be read as an

instance of such a pragmatic anthropology. The re-description of this
aspect of our life of the mind can be fully inscribed in the treatment
of habit given by the empiricist tradition. In particular, James makes
explicit reference to the works of William B. Carpenter and Alexander
Bain. James’s discussion is articulated on two levels, the physio-psy-
chological and the philosophico-practical, characterizing the nature
of habit. The novelty in James’s approach lies not so much in the
content – that is, in the empirical soundness of its description – but
rather in the method – that is, in the shifting of theoretical horizon
and ethical perspective in which habit is explored. James’s discussion
of habit represents therefore a clear case in which James works in the
path of the empiricist tradition, and yet operates a methodological
twist in its scopes by radicalizing the approach. His treatment of habit,
belief and knowledge can be read as a reprisal and radicalization of the
empiricist line of inquiry of the mind, which in the years 1870–90 was
particularly lively, both in the physiological and in the philosophical
discourse.
It is the practical dimension of this aspect of our life of the mind that
is of the most interest in the discussion of James’s ethics. James presents
habit as among the most powerful “laws” of nature: without it our lives
could not be lived, and yet its excesses are equally lethal for their flour-
ishing, since they would suffocate some of its constitutive and most
important aspects.12 The tension at the heart of this notion (habit as
possibility and habit as hindrance) represents the very core of James’s
intellectual project of putting self-experimentation at the center of our
reflective lives. This operation is carried out by James at several levels –
physiological, psychological and ethical.
James presents in the first place the physiological bases of habit, as
he writes that “the phenomena of habit in living beings are due to the plas-
ticity of the organic materials of which their bodies are composed” (PP: 110).
Habit in fact refers to the capacity for movement of our central nervous
system. However, even at this basic physical level of analysis, James
refutes a mechanistic characterization of the conditions of the func-
tioning of habit. He in fact subscribes to the anti-reductionist perspec-
tive of the reflex arch and of the electro-chemical discharge, which
portray habit as the fixation of the nervous discharge trajectories in
our nervous system in perennial tension. At this level of explanation
habit is still described as passive, since it merely indicates those privi-
leged paths of inertia (and nervous discharge). However, this passivity
is in turn characterized as a condition for activity, since it suggests and
facilitates the nervous discharge (and thus, at the psychological level,
the performance of actions). Following Carpenter, James writes that
habit crafts the nervous system by indicating to it the possibilities of

its very exercise. With the words of Franzese (2008: 127), one could
speak of “active passivity,” or “passive action:” at the physiological
level (but the same holds for the most complex philosophical level,
which James is interested in) habit organizes human beings’ “mental
economy.” The key to appreciating this passage is to notice James’s
support of Carpenter’s claim that “our nervous system grows to the
modes in which it has been exercised.” Once such paths of inertia
and discharge are chosen and reinforced in conduct they grow thicker
and acquire strength and influence, hence shaping our reactions and
dispositions. The control of this aspect of our mental life is thus of
the utmost importance for the organization of the self, whose mental
conduct will be morally judged according to the habits individuals
choose to nurture.
This characterization, as James writes, has some relevant practical appli-
cations. James is particularly interested in presenting two psychological
features and general consequences of habits that gain great importance
from the point of view of their philosophical description:
The first result of it is that habit simplifies the movements required to

achieve a given result, makes theme more accurate and diminishes the
fatigue. (PP: 117)
The next result is that habit diminishes the conscious attention with
which our acts are performed. (PP: 119)
It is important to notice how James presents both practical psycholog-

ical applications of habit from the point of view of their effectiveness for
the development of a rewarding mental life. In fact James writes how
a mind endowed with the appropriate habits is more accurate in the
achievement of its ends, and its conscious attention is less solicited in
the exercise of its actions.
These very consequences were also arrived at by Bain, who however
gave them a different psychological and philosophical meaning.
According to Bain, habit aims at minimizing the possible distractions
that could inhibit action, and thus suppress those emotions that hinder
us to reach the scopes we are interested at pursuing. Through habit we
internalize some patterns of response to determinate stimuli, and we
protect ourselves from the possibility that some emotions jeopardize our
capacity to reach what is appropriate in the particular situation at hand.
Bain however characterizes such “appropriateness” in terms of what is
“prudent,” “suitable,” or even “aesthetically appropriate,” in respect to

an order of values which deems as inappropriate those actions in which
the passionate element overwhelms the intellectual one. James refutes
this somewhat intellectualistic desideratum, which he sees as a require-
ment irrelevant to how habit works, as an intromission of a substantial
demand on a process that is instead purely psychological. He presents
such appropriateness as a function of the use we make of habits, without
making any reference to an order of values externally imposed on our
behavior.
According to James, what makes a habit good or bad is rather the
practice in which such habit is framed and the type of picture it conveys
of our psychological life. The reference to the accuracy and conscious
attention that is necessary for the success of the action are normative
parameters internal to the kind of relationship that we might entertain
with our interiority. In fact, if on the one hand habits make us more
accurate and effective, their blind and uncritical deployment has the
opposite effect of rendering us inattentive and passive. So, if, for James,
it is essential to nurture one’s habits, it is even more important to chal-
lenge them, by asking oneself which habits to cultivate, and especially
how to cultivate them. The divergence between James and Bain is even
clearer if we move to the next level of analysis that concerns habit;
namely, the philosophical one, in which ethical considerations enter
the picture with even more emphasis.
James writes that “the ethical implications of the law of habit are
numerous and momentous” (PP: 124). He presents habits as our “second
nature,” since they craft human beings in every aspect of their mental life
and conducts. Rather than the mechanical repetition of our responses
through comparison and association with our past experiences, James
depicts habit as the distinctive trait of our active attitude toward our
interiority and stance toward reality. Habit becomes thus a device for
storing, organizing and controlling our mental energy, releasing in this
way our attention, which is continuously solicited by the great amount
of information involved in our experiences. Once we internalize some
aspects of reality to which we pay selective attention, our consciousness
of them and the effort to entertain them in our mind is alleviated: we
become free to concentrate on the aspects of reality that interest us. Our
very ability to have experiences, as well as the ability to invest them
with a value that goes beyond their sheer factual happening (that is,
breaking the order of immediate perceptive presence that presents the
world as an indistinct complexity) requires us to develop habits. In the
essay “Reflex Action and Theism” – which represents another example
of the way psychological investigations might inform ethics in a non-

foundational way – James writes:
We have to break [the perceptual order] altogether, and by picking out

from it the items that concern us ... we are able to ... enjoy simplicity
and harmony in the place of what was chaos ... It is an order with
which we have nothing to do but to get away from it as fast as
possible. As I said, we break it: we break it into histories, and we break
it into the arts, and we break it into sciences; and than we begin to
feel at home. (WB: 96)
Through our inclusion and omission we trace the path of habit and
thus of our experiencing altogether. The aim of habit is to make us “feel
at home,” breaking our experiences by connecting the elements that
interest us with others that we also find appropriate and worth enter-
taining in our minds (and lives). Habit thus contributes to our activities
of making sense of the world and of our encounters with it. Through
habit we craft the world, giving it a human shape in which we inscribe
our actions and their deepest significances.
The ethical stakes of such a characterization are of the outmost impor-
tance. James claims in fact that habit is the “engine of society” and its
“precious preserver,” sounding in this respect like Bain. However, James
adds, the primary object of habit is the character of human beings, repre-
senting its “invisible law” in the similar manner as the “universal gravita-
tion” represents the hidden law of celestial bodies. Habit deals with the
education of one’s character: it represents the law of one’s personal (and
not immediately social) conduct that we form and give ourselves through
a discipline of the self. Habits are morally relevant because they pervade
our lives and guide our encounters with the world, thus making the world
a place hospitable for the expression of our interiority through conduct.
In the chapter on “The Laws of Habit” of TT James writes that:
Our virtues are habits as much as our vices. All our life, so far as it has
definite form, is but a mass of habits,– practical, emotional, and intel-
lectual,– systematically organized for our weal or woe, and bearing us
irresistibly toward our destiny, whatever the latter may be. (TT: 47)
James states the connection between ethics and psychology in an even

clear form in PP where he writes:
The great thing, then, in all education, is to make our nervous system our
ally instead of our enemy. It is to fund and capitalize our acquisitions, and
live at ease upon the interest of the fund. For this we must make auto-
matic and habitual, as early as possible, as many useful actions as we can,
and guard against the growing into ways that are likely to be disadvan-
tageous to us, as we should guard against the plague. (PP: 122)
Habits should be our ally, and yet we should also stay vigilant because
they could turn out to be our worst enemies. For James, in fact, habits
are not virtuous or evil per se, but rather it is what we make of them and
how we nurture them that make them relevant from a moral point of view.
If, on the one hand, habits give voice to our deepest needs, cravings and
interests, on the other hand, their inappropriate use might cause their
very suppression.
James lists five practical maxims underlying the philosophical treat-
ment of habit in which what is at stake is our very attitude and stance
on them. These maxims have a clear and pronounced salience in their
dealing with the ways in which our habits might be expressive of our
subjectivity or rather suffocate it. The last maxim best catches the spirit
of this exhortative moral register. James writes:
As a final practical maxim, relative to these habits of the will, we may,

then, offer something like this: Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by
a little gratuitous exercise every day. That is, be systematically ascetic or
heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for
no other reason than that you would rather not do it, so that when
the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may find you not unnerved and
untrained to stand the test ... So with the man who has daily inured
himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and
self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when
everything rocks around him, and when his softer fellow-mortals are
winnowed like chaff in the blast. (PP: 130)
This practical maxim thematizes the dynamic relationship running

between habits we might cultivate and our particular attitude toward
them. James is interested in marking an internal connection between
ethics and psychology by showing how our attitude toward those habits
(whether we welcome or challenge them) is the mark of our moral
destiny: human beings are the authors of and solely responsible for their
own fate. The price we have to pay for the metaphysical comfort of habit,
representing the shield we use in order to be successful in our commerce
with the world, is the constant impoverishment of such commerce. That
is to say, the price of inhabiting the world is to be a stranger to oneself.
Only by acknowledging the habits we live by as our habits might we
keep in place their significance without subjugating our subjectivity, or

making the appreciation of experience an impossible task to accomplish.
James writes:
It is surprising how soon a desire will die of inanition if it be never

fed. One must first learn, unmoved, looking neither to the right nor
left, to walk firmly on the straight and narrow path, before one can
begin ‘to make one’s self over again.’ He who every day makes a fresh
resolve is like one who, arriving at the edge of the ditch he is to leap,
forever stops and returns for a fresh run. Without unbroken advance
there is no such thing as accumulation of the ethical forces possible,
and to make this possible, and to exercise us and habituate us in it, is
the sovereign blessing of regular work. (PP: 124)
Quoting Mill’s definition of character as a “completed fashioned will”

James stresses the relationship between the sensation of effort/activity
necessary to manage a certain habit and its moral character: by repre-
senting a habit as something imposed from the outside, as for example
from evidences and associations on which we have no grip nor active
control, we distort both the way in which we arrive at having a habit
and jeopardize its very significance. We develop habits in response to
our more genuine practical needs, so as to relate in a more effective way
to the world. However, when we represent habit as an impediment to
the full flourishing of our interiority, a cage for its expression, we will
find ourselves incapable to satisfy those very practical needs that gave
life to them in the first place. James writes:
The physiological study of mental conditions is thus the most

powerful ally of hortatory ethics. The hell to be endured hereafter, of
which theology tells, is no worse than the hell we make for ourselves
in this world by habitually fashioning our characters in the wrong
way. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere
walking bundles of habits, they would give more heed to their
conduct while in the plastic state. We are spinning our own fates,
good or evil, and never to be undone. Every smallest stroke of virtue
or of vice leaves its never so little scar. (PP: 130–1)
Moral reflection, in its hortatory dimension, aims at showing the prac-

tical advantages of the nurture and development of a certain habit, and
the danger we incur when we are alienated by them, which makes us
incapable of dealing with the difficulties that we might encounter in
our engagement in conducts that are expressive of our subjectivity.

According to this characterization the object of ethics is a certain kind of
work on ourselves, while its content is the description of the forms such
activity might assume. James claims that this work on the self interests
in the first place our habits and their ability to express our subjectivity
or rather mortify it. Ethics invites us to be vigilant towards our habits
to prevent those “contractions of the self” typical of their deformation.
Habits give voice to our practical perspective of moral agents precisely
because their nurture and flourishing involve a work on the self that
contributes to the formation of one’s character and practical identity.
If we now proceed to analyze James’s treatment of belief, we shall
see similar considerations in place. In fact, the pragmatic description of
this other central aspect of our life of the mind has tremendous ethical
consequences, since in it James explores the theme of the peculiar
engaged and committed stance featuring our encountering the world.
Belief (but the same holds for James’s characterization of knowledge),
far from being depicted as a mere mechanism of mirroring of reality,
calls for a practical and personal involvement on the part of the subject
entertaining it. Beliefs are in fact the expression of one’s point of view of
the world. By identifying beliefs with evidence, James claims, we would
distort the very nature of our mental life and, worse, lose the ability to
appreciate large regions of experience.
Belief as navigation and transaction
In chapter xxi of PP, entitled “The Perception of Reality,” James explores

the nature and workings of belief, showing the polyhedric character
of this central aspect of our life of the mind. James presents belief as
the “mental state or function of cognizing reality,” and proceeds in a
progressive semantic disarticulation of such a simple (and rather unprob-
lematic) definition. James writes how each psychological state might be
studied in two ways: either analytically (that is, by asking what does it
consists of: its nature or composition) or historically (what are its condi-
tions of emergence or its connections to other facts of our psychology?).
The response to the analytic question, says James, is quite evident and
hardly arguable. He writes:
In its inner nature, belief or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied
to the emotions than anything else ... It resembles more than anything
what in the psychology of volition we know as consent. Consent is
recognized by all to be a manifestation of our active nature. It would
naturally be described by such terms as ‘willingness’ or the ‘turning

of our disposition.’ What characterizes both consent and belief is
the cessation of theoretic agitation, though the advent of an idea
which is inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the exclusion
of contradictory ideas. When this is the case, motor effects are apt to
follow. Hence the states of consent and belief, characterized by repose
on the purely intellectual side, are both intimately connected with
subsequent practical activity. (PP: 912–3)
This characterization of belief as an aspect of our interiority, allied with

the emotions, and whose nature is akin to the consent of will, denounces
its intertwinement with the most practical aspects of our mind. Usually
depicted as a mere intellective and cognizant element, together with
consent belief would rather be the clearest expression of our practical
and conative constitution, and thus the mark of our nature of epis-
temic practical agents. Its most distinctive element, says James, is the
“cessation of theoretic agitation, though the advent of an idea which is
inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the exclusion of contradic-
tory ideas” as a consequence of practical considerations. The Peircean
legacy of this characterization is evident.13 The opposite of belief would
thus not be disbelief, but rather doubt: when in this state of mind we are
practically dissatisfied, and in need of an “emotion of belief” to relieve
the tension. James concludes that belief is not be to conceived as a mere
connection between an object and a subject, nor as the result of their
encounter. Rather, belief is a part of a more complex compound, which
ends in a judgment. James writes:
In every proposition, then, so far as it is believed, questioned, or

disbelieved, four elements are to be distinguished, the subject, the
predicate, and their relation (of whatever sort it be) – these form the
object of belief – and finally the psychic attitude in which our mind
stands towards the proposition taken as a whole-and this is the belief
itself. (PP: 917)
Where classical empiricism used to represent belief either as the

(mechanical) encounter between subject and object, or as a (chemical)
synthesis between the two, James characterizes it as the peculiar stance
of the subject in respect of her encounters with reality. Beliefs give voice
to our point of view on experience, and express the way in which we
cope with reality. This is, according to James, all that one can say about
belief from a purely analytical (and thus internal) point of view.
Moving to what he labels as the second, historical issue James asks:

“Under what circumstances do we think things real?” This questioning is
particularly rich and James’s answers give us many cues for re-thinking
the practical character of belief and its relevance to ethics. James invites
us to reflect on what it means to know anything, and what the role
of belief is in knowledge. He is quite ready to accept the definition of
knowledge as correspondence with reality, claiming however that this
in not everything there is to say about such a central concept, since at
this point we might (and should) proceed by asking what precisely the
nature of that correspondence is. For James, the picture of correspond-
ence offered by both idealism and British empiricism is suffocating, as
well as empirically unsound, since it describes the mind as a passive
device and truth as a stagnant property of ideas (whether transcendental
or brute). In this scenario there seems to be no place for values and our
distinctive personal contribution, and certainly no places for the projec-
tion from our mind that spreads onto the world and colors it norma-
tively. Against this picture, and accordingly with our ordinary practices
of knowledge and conduct, James depicts that of correspondence as a
practical stance in which we express our most personal point of view
on the world.
According to James, both our cognitions and our beliefs – the two
most basic aspects of experiencing – are infused by practical considera-
tions that are not reducible to mere volitional projections and do not
take into account the features of reality to which we attribute meaning.
Cognition, in a manner similar to consent, is in fact characterized as a
device for action, or rather a constitutive part of it. James writes:
Cognition, in this view, is but a fleeting moment, a cross-section at

a certain point of what in its totality is a motor phenomenon. In the
lower forms of life no one will pretend that cognition is anything
more than a guide to appropriate action. The germinal question
concerning things brought for the first time before consciousness is
not the theoretic “What is that?” but the practical “Who goes there?”
or rather, as Horwicz has admirably put it, “What is to be done?” –
“Was fang’ ich an?” (PP: 941)
Russell Goodman aptly notices in this context how “according to

James, a precondition for certain kinds of knowing or communication
with the nature of things is an act or attitude of the knowing subject”
(Goodman 2002: 70). James writes in fact that knowledge proceeds
through progressive approximations to the evidences that we encounter
in experiencing; and yet in this process we are always active as we select

such very evidences on the base of practical considerations. In each
belief some choice is involved: a choice expressing the particular point
of view of the subject on the situation at issue.
This theme plays a central role in PP, as well as in the moral essays
that I shall present in the next chapter. It represents the clearest expres-
sion of the practical conception of knowledge according to which there
is no act of cognition that is not informed and transformed by a prac-
tical involvement of the subject conducting it. James enlists the “various
orders of reality” that human beings might inhabit depending on their
active disposition. Judgments on these different words are expressive of
the diverse “points of view” expressing one’s active personal involve-
ment with the reality pertaining to that particular order. James writes
how “each world whilst it is attended to is real after its own fashion; only
the reality lapses with the attention.” James depicts a world of “practical
realities” that is established by an act of attention on the part of the
subjects whose lives are informed by them. It is habit again; this time in
combination with the selective mechanism of attention, which plays a
major role in the characterization of such realities. James writes:
Each thinker, however, has dominant habits of attention; and these

practically elect from among the various worlds some one to be for him
the world of ultimate realities. From this world’s objects he does not
appeal. In all this the everlasting partiality of our nature shows itself,
our inveterate propensity to choice. (PP: 923)
The partiality of which James speaks is not to be considered as a theo-

retical partiality, generating skepticism in the assessment of truths, but
rather as a practical partiality, referring to our diverse ways of paying
attention to reality. It is a partiality which generates a plurality of
responses and conducts, and that has interesting moral consequences.
James continues:
In this sense, whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real; whenever
an object so appeals to us that we turn to it, accept it, fill our mind
with it, or practically take account of it, so far it is real for us, and we
believe it. Whenever, on the contrary, we ignore it, fail to consider it
or act upon it, despise it, reject it, forget it, so far it is unreal for us
and disbelieved. (PP: 924)
This approach is contrasted with the intellectualistic (that is, rationalist)

picture of knowledge – as a passive intuition or unengaged reception
of the real. It is here important to appreciate how, in rejecting ration-

alism, James endorses a form of empiricism that does not, however, issue
in a subjectivist picture of belief and knowledge (that is, the position
according to which the truth at which we aim our belief and knowl-
edge is a function of what we want it to be). James aims at refuting
an intellectualistic position (according to which truth would be deaf to
sensibility) without going to the opposite extreme of what he retains as
sheer emotionalism (according to which truth would be impermeable
to reason). In “The Dilemma of Determinism” James draws a contrast
between subjectivism and pragmatism, in terms of their different epis-
temological emphases: immediate sensitivities and their qualities for
the former while conduct and practice for the latter. He quotes a line
from Carlyle: “Hang your sensibilities! Stop your sniveling complaints,
and your equally sniveling raptures! Leave off your general emotional
tomfoolery, and get to WORK.” James comments by articulating his own
pragmatist views on the primacy of activity over sensitivity:
This means a complete rupture with the subjectivist philosophy

of things. It says conduct, and not sensibility, is the ultimate fact
for our recognition. With the vision of certain works to be done, of
certain outward changes to be wrought or resisted, it says our intel-
lectual horizon terminates. No matter how we succeed in doing these
outward duties, whether gladly and spontaneously, or heavily and
unwillingly, do them we somehow must; for the leaving of them
undone is perdition. No matter how we feel; if we are only faithful
in the outward act and refuse to do wrong, the world will in so far
be safe, and we quit of our debt toward it. Take, then, the yoke upon
our shoulders; bend our neck beneath the heavy legality of its weight;
regard something else than our feeling as our limit, our master, and
our law; be willing to live and die in its service, – and, at a stroke,
we have passed from the subjective into the objective philosophy of
things, much as one awakens from some feverish dream, full of bad
lights and noises, to find one’s self bathed in the sacred coolness and
quiet of the air of the night. (WB: 197–8)
According to James it is thus conduct, and not its inner marks, which
should be the focus of our ethical deeds and their philosophical accounts.
By representing our point of view on a certain situation, actions and not
mere sensations are in fact the genuine engine of moral evaluations and
judgments.
We can read in James an internal critique of classical empiricism – and
of Hume’s version more in particular – regarding the role of sentiment in
moral evaluations. James is not denying that sentiment plays a central

role in our cognitive and moral lives, as Hume argued, and yet he offers
a different story of the way they do so. For James sentiments are relevant
for ethics not because they identify what is desired as good or noble, but
rather because they prompt us to embrace a perspective from which we
can appreciate what is desirable as good or noble. The critique James
offered against subjectivism is logical, since it criticizes the idea that
feelings and emotions function as the ultimate criterion of moral evalu-
ation, and suggests instead how they play a major role when embedded
in conducts whose goal is the realization of those states of things that we
see as worth being realized, from the point of view of such sentimental
endowment. Through cultivating such conducts we pay attention to the
aspects of he world that we find interesting and important, being in this
way responsive to them without renouncing our subjectivity through
such deeds.
James warns that those descriptions of belief as an activity that do not
involve any contribution on the part of our sensibility are deceptive,
and shows how the constitution of the particular truths we encounter
in our ordinary practices is always moved by practical considerations.
James speaks of a psychological state (that could also assume patholog-
ical implications) opposite to the one of belief in which “everything is
hollow, unreal, dead.” This state, differently from the vivacity that char-
acterizes both belief and doubt (even if in opposite ways), is dead since
it has no connection with our subjectivity – or rather the latter has been
severed. The lack of vitality depends thus on our attitude toward reality
and is not a feature of reality itself. Live options are those in which the
self engages her subjectivity in the attainment of a certain truth, while
dead ones are the one to which our subjectivity is hollow. While in the
former case our personal attitude is lively and engaged, in the latter it is
passive, disinterested and thus inert. The acknowledgement of this fact
about ordinary phenomenology is a necessary precondition for under-
standing the nature of belief.
In the last section of the chapter on reality James explores the rela-
tionship between belief and will, showing how these two aspects of
our mental life are intimately intertwined. By stressing how the enter-
tainment of a certain belief expresses the kind of desirability that its
truth exerts on us and creates the conditions for its satisfaction, James
suggests an account of our experiencing as an activity that prompts us
to assume a certain stance toward reality so that we see it as alive and
meaningful. According to this picture, the conditions for the validity of
our beliefs cannot thus be established independently from their effective
entertainment, since the conditions for the attainment of the necessary

evidences for its validation can be gained only once the belief is practi-
cally entertained as a live and available option.
Beliefs thus create their own conditions of satisfaction: on enter-
taining them our perspective on (and thus the importance that we
can appreciate in) the reality relevant for their assessment changes.
According to James we cannot believe in what we do not appreciate
as a live option, and at the same time options are alive or not because
we are able to look at them from the point of view of the belief that is
interesting and engaging to entertain. A belief is thus an act of our will
as it expresses our commitment to the truth of a certain picture of the
world: it is only from within such a picture that our belief acquires full
legitimacy.
In the discussion of habit and belief I have stressed more than one
cross-reference and overlap with such notions such as attention and the
will, which in PP occupy a chapter each. These two aspects of our life
of the mind call directly in cause the kind of engaged attitude that we
might take in respect to our interiority and the world. In the next section
I shall focus on these two aspects, explicating their connections with
both habit and belief and assessing their relevance for the pragmatic
characterization of the connection between ethics and psychology that
I am investigating in this chapter.
Attention, will, and moral perspectivism
At first glance, the chapter of PP on “Attention” does not appear to be

of particular interest for a discussion of the relevance of psychology to
ethics. The chapter is in fact highly technical, and it mostly consists in
quotations and discussion of the literature of the time on the physiology
of attention and the feeling of effort. James presents and discusses the
time-measurement (methronomy) of attention and its pervasiveness as
a psychological phenomenon that interests virtually all aspects of our
mental life, and in particular the stream of thought and the conscious-
ness of the self. However, at a more attentive view we find dissemi-
nated in the text many interesting philosophical insights on the moral
relevance of attention which, as we began to see in the past section,
are intertwined with the discussion of the other aspects of our mental
life (habit, belief – and will above all). In particular, James envisions
an internal connection between attention and interest, and speculates
about the effects of such intertwinement on the way we can depict our
processes of experiencing.
Despite their apparent simplicity, these two aspects of the mind are
described by James as the sources of moral, epistemological and meta-
physical considerations. Attention, in fact, beyond explaining the
selective and thus practical character of knowledge, shapes those very
realities that we claim to know (or happen to believe). Things are in fact
not considered real until they are noticed, selected and entertained in our
mind. According to James, the very concept of reality does not have full
citizenship in our practical life without active intervention by our atten-
tion, and thus before we describe the existence of a particular reality as
interesting or important.
James thus places his discussion of attention in the wider discourse
of the practical character of experience and its epistemological account.
He in fact opens the chapter lamenting the scarce consideration that
the empiricist school dedicated to the “perpetual presence of selective
attention” (PP: 380) in our epistemic practices. James explains this lack
by referring to the principle of association endorsed by British empiri-
cism (Locke, Hume, Hartley, the Mills, and Spencer), which described our
experiences (even the most complex ones) as the products of associations
of elements that are “simply given” to us through the senses. According
to this philosophical tradition, experiences are the result of pure recep-
tivity: so, attention, which is a radically active process, does not seem to
play any important role in this picture. James notices how the German
school (Wundt, Helmholtz, Fechner, and Stumpf) accounted extensively
for attention, and yet portrayed it as a faculty, thus jeopardizing the intui-
tion that paying attention is something that we do (and cannot but do)
as part of our participation in the stream of experience and not itself a
product of some process over which we might fail to have control. James
is interested in showing the possibility of a description of attention that is
empirical, and yet at the same time wants to challenge the “merely recep-
tive” picture of experience offered by classical empiricism. He writes:
Attention, implying a degree of reactive spontaneity, would seem to

break through the circle of pure receptivity which constitutes ‘experi-
ence,’ and hence must not be spoken of under penalty of interfering
with the smoothness of the tale. But the moment one thinks of the
matter, one sees how false a notion of experience that is which would
make it tantamount to the mere presence to the senses of an outward
order. Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses
which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they
have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only
those items which I notice shape my mind – without selective interest,
experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives accent and emphasis,

light and shade, background and foreground – intelligible perspec-
tive, in a word. (PP: 380–1)
According to this alternative picture our mind is always purposive in

knowledge: even the individuation of its various elements is an active
process (according to James, always a functional abstraction from the
whole stream of experience), as it is their connection to form more
complex structures. Attention and interest denote the intrinsically inten-
tional nature of the mind, as well as the practical character of experience.
Since nothing is appreciable if we don’t pay attention to it, then there
is no experience that is, according to James, a sheer mirroring of reality,
which merely presents us with brute data or evidence. Our experiences
reflect our preferences and are guided by our attention, representing
in this way the most evident expression of our very engaged attitude
toward the world. As James writes, “The interest itself, though its genesis
is doubtless perfectly natural, makes experience more than it is made by
it” (PP: 381). This point is an epistemological as well as an ethical one.
James aims at challenging the Spencerian picture of the mind as a
block of clay that is modeled by the rain of experience, in which there
seems to be no place for the active elements of the focalization and
concentration of consciousness typical of attention. James refutes this
picture both on the psycho-physiological level and for its philosoph-
ical consequences: in fact, according to the Spencerian picture, mental
mechanisms are passive and do not involve any personal contribution
in the apprehension of reality. James claims that this hypothesis is both
empirically unsound (it has, in fact, been put in question by phenom-
enological accounts, as well as by laboratory experiments, of which
the chapter abounds in quotations) and morally unacceptable, since
it describes us as mere spectators of the world, mortifying in this way
the richness of our engagement with it. Leaving the background of the
psycho-physiological level of analysis (I don’t in fact think that James
considered such evidence conclusive per se – nor should we, for that
matter – but rather only as a datum to be taken into consideration), I
shall concentrate on the most interesting philosophical aspects of the
pragmatic alternative to the mechanistic conception of attention.
James binds attention with interest, and characterizes them as the two
fundamental traits of our constitution of practical beings:
The things to which we attend are said to interest us. Our interest in
them is supposed to be the cause of our attending. (PP: 392)
The practical and theoretical life of whole species, as well as of indi-

vidual beings, results from the selection which the habitual direction
of their attention involves. (PP: 401)
Attention, by selecting the things that we find interesting, can take

place with or without any effort on our part, and yet it is always volun-
tary. Attention, in fact, when it is directed to objects and situations
with which we are confident and familiar, is not particularly mentally
burdensome, but it can become so when we turn our attention to previ-
ously unexplored regions of experience. Then, James writes, its effects on
our overall mental attitude are particularly significant. Attention in fact
sharpens our perception, helps our memory and improves our ability to
form and criticize concepts. However, its most important consequences
are of a practical and moral kind, since attention characterizes us as
agents and not mere spectators of the life of the mind:
When we reflect that the turnings of our attention form the nucleus
of our inner self; when we see ... that volition is nothing but atten-
tion; when we believe that our autonomy in the midst of nature
depends on our not being pure effect, but a cause, we must admit that
the question whether attention involve such a principle of spiritual
activity or not is metaphysical as well as psychological, and is well
worthy of all the pains we can bestow on its solution. It is in fact the
pivotal question of metaphysics, the very hinge on which our picture
of the world shall swing from materialism, fatalism, monism, towards
spiritualism, freedom, pluralism, – or else the other way. (PP: 423–4)
In his late writings James reprised this characterization of attention, in

order to show its relevance in the choice between various metaphysical
(and philosophical) options.14 What I am interested in highlighting
here is the internal connection that James draws between attention and
will, which is for him functional to suggest a compelling image of moral
reflection as stemming from the pragmatic characterization of these two
seminal aspects of our subjectivity.15
Chapter xxvi on the “Will” is among the longest and densest of PP,
with which virtually every scholar of James measured her reading and
understanding of his work – and which, together with the chapter
on the stream of thought, is still considered to be the most original
and insightful contribution of PP to philosophical psychology. In it
we find some of the most interesting ethical considerations related to
the pragmatic description of the other aspects of our mind that I have
been presenting in recent sections. Furthermore, it is in the discussion

of the will that, according to me, the connection between ethics and
psychology, envisioned by James, appears in its most distinctive shape,
and the dialogue brought to its most radical consequences.
The discussion of the will proceeds from the investigation of its physi-
ological aspect as well. In particular, James analyzes the connection
between the sensation of effort and the voluntary actions generated by
it. After a scrupulous analysis of the relevant literature of the time, James
concludes that such a connection should be understood in the light of
the characterization of the will as the readiness of the mind to entertain
the idea catching its attention, and act in order to realize it. The will
is thus presented as a practical ability, and not as a theoretical faculty:
it is the ability to conduct a life in which one’s instincts, habits, and
automatic responses are accompanied by decision springing in actions
expressive of one’s subjectivity, in the measure in which they require a
specific attention and effort in order to be performed.
In PP James works within the theoretical framework of ideo-motorial
actions independently developed by Bain, Renouvier and Lotze,16 who
argued for the existence of ideas with the capacity to produce movements
without the intervention of other nervous mediations nor psychological
considerations. James writes:
Whenever movement follows unhesitatingly and immediately the

notion of it in the mind, we have ideo-motor action. We are then
aware of nothing between the conception and the execution. All
sorts of neuro-muscular processes come between, of course, but we
know absolutely nothing of them. We think the act, and it is done;
and that is all that introspection tells us of the matter ... In all this the
determining condition of the unhesitating and resistless sequence of
the act seems to be the absence of any conflicting notion in the mind.
Either there is nothing else at all in the mind, or what is there does
not conflict. (PP: 1130–2)
According to this picture, in some cases the connection between thought

and action, far from being mediated by any physiological or psycho-
logical trigger, would be rather direct. We act on the apprehension and
the conceptions we have of determinate contents and concepts because
the entertainment of a certain idea just results in the endorsement of a
certain conduct – although some impediments might hinder its realiza-
tion, as for example the presence of a contrasting idea on which we
cannot make our minds. The will is thus for James the expression of the
way in which we entertain certain ideas. By intertwining thought with

action, James breaks with the post-Cartesian tradition picturing a divide
between cognitive and conative aspects of our mental life: between
beliefs representing reality and desires prompting us to act in a certain
way. Rather than a matter of a “quasi-hydraulic”17 exercise of our desid-
erative part, James invites us to see deliberation as an evaluation of the
conflicting ideas that we entertain in our mind over what is to be the
case. The resulting action would thus be the expression of the resolution
of the will: the exercise of attention selects, among conflicting ideas, the
idea that is relevant, leaving the others in the background.
The choice between diverse ideas made by the will is, however, not
a heuristic mechanism, by which a choice is made by consulting an
external and already established system of evaluation. Rather, the
choice is an expression of the exercise of our sensibility that brings us
to “silencing”18 the contrasting ideas, thus shaping our outlook on the
world. Deliberation is described by James as an art: the result of a crea-
tion that is expressive of our interiority, in which we give voice to our
point of view on things. According to this anti-dualistic picture, cogni-
tive and conative abilities are always bonded in their practical exercise
and define what matters for us in perceiving as well as in acting.
This characterization leads James to question one of the empiricist
assumptions, according to which it is our sentiment and passions alone
which by investing our ideas with a certain force prompt us to act
accordingly. In deliberation, according to James, our minds are fastened
on the very ideas under consideration, and action follows from the right
conception of the relevant idea – that is, the idea which fits best for us in
the situation under consideration – so that all the positive feelings arise
precisely because we have so decided. This is what, according to James,
constitutes the essence of genuine moral deeds.
Furthermore, in this perspective, what one ought to do (and what
one actually ends up doing) is not reducible to sheer considerations of
pleasure and pain alone, as the associationist tradition argued. In fact,
there are many cases in which such considerations are at odds with the
moral point of view, representing a major impediment to its achieve-
ment. James discusses a great deal of literature of the time, Bain more
than any other, and invokes the views of Sidgwick, Green and Martineau
as genuine alternatives to the empiricist presumption. Far from negating
the value of Bain’s position, which he praises for its insights about the
practical character of beliefs, James criticizes some of its main philo-
sophical assumptions: as, for example, the conviction that ideas cannot
motivate one to act since they merely tell how to think about something.
This hypothesis, he says, is at odds with our ordinary phenomenology,

in which such a categorical divide, between cognition ad motivations,
finds no space:
I am far from denying the exceeding prominence and importance of

the part which pleasures and pains, both felt and represented, play in
the motivation of our conduct. But I must insist that it is no exclu-
sive part, and that coordinately with these mental object innumer-
able others have an exactly similar impulsive and inhibitive power.
If one must have a single name for the condition upon which the
impulsive and inhibitive quality of objects depends, one had better
call it their interest. “The interesting” is a title which covers not only
the pleasant and the painful, but also the morbidly fascinating, the
tediously haunting, and even the simply habitual, inasmuch as the
attention usually travels on habitual lines, and what-we-attend-to
and what-interests-us are synonymous terms. It seems as if we ought
to look for the secret of an idea’s impulsiveness, not in any peculiar
relations which it may have with paths of motor discharge, – for all
ideas have relations with some such paths, – but rather in a prelimi-
nary phenomenon, the urgency, namely, with which it is able to compel
attention and dominate in consciousness. (PP: 1163)
By arguing that interest/attention, not pleasure/pain, motivate us James

binds together cognitive and conative aspects of our mind in his expla-
nation of purposive thought. Interests, despite being the result of the
exercise of our sensibility, directly refer to how things are in the world.
James refutes in this way a picture of the world as a brute and disen-
chanted dimension on which we project our preferences, and makes it
a place hospitable for values and meanings, which arise from whatever
stance or attitude we might adopt toward it. This alternative picture,
whose development in his other writings on ethics will delineate what
we might call a realistic conceptions of values, counterbalances the
common reception of James as an anti-realist about values. This type of
realism relates to the shift from mere sensitivities to an enriched concep-
tion of agency and intentionality.
The moral consequences of this characterization are numerous and
momentous. James, by portraying the will as the expression of our
attitude toward reality and the personal representations we make of
it, secures practical considerations at the very heart of our most basic
perceptive and discriminatory activity. This irreducibly practical char-
acter of our cognitive activities permeates all the aspects of our life of
the mind and guides its expression. According to this picture, our beliefs
(and the knowledge that represents their normative horizon) are the
expression of our interests: our very experience has an irreducible prac-
tical and transformative character.
Since nothing is knowable, or even perceivable, if the mind does not
find it interesting and thus pays no attention to it, the activity of will
consists in the exercise of this attention through which we give relevance
to some aspects of reality above others that might strike us. The will, far
from being the mediator between impressions and action, is rather the
expression of our point of view on a certain situation, which without
our effort of attention would disappear from our horizon of experience.
By deciding to pay attention to a certain idea we choose to adhere to
a particular aspect of reality: that choice then determines the self one
becomes – the experiences we enjoy, how we are able to express and
account for those experiences.
The discussion of the will in PP continues with the characterization
of this double moral register. James argues that the effort of the will is a
function of the effort of attention that we pay toward the diverse aspects
of experience. The effort of attention, in its turn, is nothing but the
expression of our selective consciousness. Attention is a function of the
interests we have – for James, we pay attention only to those aspects of
reality that appear to be interesting to us. James speaks about the “normal
ratio” of our will, which naturally pursues those aspects to which we pay
attention. When this happens, we can speak of a “healthiness of will:”
There is a certain normal ratio in the impulsive power of different sorts

of motive, which characterizes what may be called ordinary healthiness
of will, and which is departed from only at exceptional times or by
exceptional individuals. Each stimulus or idea, at the same time that
it wakens its own impulse, must arouse other ideas (associated and
consequential) with their impulses, and action must follow, neither
too slowly nor too rapidly, as the resultant of all the forces thus
engaged. Even when the decision is very prompt, there is thus a sort
of preliminary survey of the field and a vision of which course is best
before the fiat comes. And where the will is healthy, the vision must be
right (i.e., the motives must be on the whole in a normal or not too
unusual ratio to each other), and the action must obey the vision’s lead.
(PP: 1143)
This rich quotation corroborates what James claimed in the previous

chapters, pushing his position in an even more radical direction. James
in facts binds the will to the capacity to envision aspects of the world.
When the will is healthy, the vision it expresses is sound and the actions
following it grounded, as it follows from a reliable deliberation expressive
of our point of view.
If thus the mechanism of the will is psychological, its consequences
are philosophical in a robust sense of the term. According to James
objects of immediate interest (that is, the ones we evaluate as most
important) catch our attention more easily. In these cases the will does
not encounter any resistance, so that we picture such objects as near
and under reach. Among these objects some are emotionally charged;
others we have more confidence in due to a history of gratification.
The less interesting objects are instead the most difficult ones to pay
attention to, because of our indifference toward their realization. They
are the remotest from our interest and the will, in order to realize them,
must commit to them with a lot of energy and entertain them with great
effort. Among these are: abstract concepts, the most original ideals, and
motives with which we or our community are never confronted.
However, says James, this order can be subverted, causing in turn what
he calls the “illness of the will.” James presents a detailed phenome-
nology of these possible deviations, which he divides into “precipitate
will” and “perverse will.” In the first case, the action follows from the
stimulus or the idea too rapidly, leaving no time for assessing its intel-
ligibility. In the second case, these latter are appreciated, and yet the
equilibrium that normally characterizes the restrictive and the inhibi-
tory forces is distorted. James concentrates on the second possibility,
which he explores in great detail, while disregarding the former, which
he regards as less interesting. The pervasiveness of the will can be
characterized in greater detail by distinguishing the ways in which its
contrastive forces are distributed: James talks about an “explosive will”
and an “obstructed will.” When we suffer from the former our will is
impulsive (its inhibition is not sufficient or the impulse is excessive)
and thus poorly accurate or even dangerous; when we suffer from the
latter, however, our will is obstructed (the impulse in not sufficient or
the inhibition is excessive) and thus timid and ineffective.
The second possibility has both serious moral consequences, since
it threatens to endanger our very personal integrity, and a great prac-
tical urgency, since it seems to jeopardize the grounding principle of
the ideo-motorial hypothesis. James’s discussion of this phenomenon is
very instructive to appreciate the distinctiveness of his position as well
as the consistency of the pragmatic anthropology underlying it. As we
saw in the discussion of belief, James claimed at times that reality might
appear to be dead, inert and inexpressive, depending on the attitude

we assume toward it. The same can be said about truths in relationship
with the will:
In Chapter XXI, as will be remembered, it was said that the sentiment

of reality with which an object appealed to the mind is proportionate
(amongst other things) to its efficacy as a stimulus to the will. Here
we get the obverse side of the truth. Those ideas, objects, considera-
tions, which (in these lethargic states) fail to get to the will, fail to
draw blood, seem, in so far forth, distant and unreal. The connection
of the reality of things with their effectiveness as motives is a tale
that has never yet been fully told. The moral tragedy of human life
comes almost wholly from the fact that the link is ruptured which
normally should hold between vision of the truth and action, and
that this pungent sense of effective reality will not attach to certain
ideas. (PP: 1153)
James labels as a moral tragedy the situation in which we are unable to

connect our vision of truth with the realization of some good. In these
cases our will is torn apart by contrastive pushes, and its exercise is thus
frustrated by an incapacity and obstruction to discharge in conduct.
Such perversion impedes the will to motivate the subject to realize those
apprehended truths:
Their moral knowledge, always there grumbling and rumbling in

the background, – discerning, commenting, protesting, longing,
half resolving – never wholly resolves, never gets its voice out of the
minor into the major key, or its speech out of the subjunctive into the
imperative mood, never breaks the spell, never takes the helm into its
hands ... The more ideal motives exist alongside of them in profusion,
but they never get switched on, and the man’s conduct is no more
influenced by them than an express train is influenced by a wayfarer
standing by the roadside and calling to be taken aboard. (PP: 1154)
The way out of this psychologically consuming and morally upsetting

situation is described by James in terms of a personal transformation,
in which we imagine and engage in an alternative conduct through
whereby we release the obstructed will.
James claims that, in these critical situations, we spontaneously
conceive effort as an active force added to the ones of the motives
prevailing in our will. In a normal situation, both in the case of bodies
moving because of physical forces and in cases of a “healthy will,” we
represent the movement or action “in the line of minor resistance,” or

of “major traction” of the effort. However, in the case of complex situa-
tions, in which what is at stake are ideals and conceptions written higher
or harder to achieve, we feel that the contribution of effort to the will
does not proceed along a line of less resistance, but rather along one of
greater resistance. In the cases in which the will seems to be obstructed,
ideals mark a difference with mere propensity because of the relation-
ship that they establish with the effort that we have to employ in order
to realize them. James writes:
The sensualist never says of his behavior that it results from a victory
over his ideals, but the moralist always speaks of his as a victory over
his propensities. The sensualist uses terms of inactivity, says he forgets
his ideals, is deaf to duty, and so forth; which terms seem to imply that
the ideal motives per se can be annulled without energy or effort, and
that the strongest mere traction lies in the line of the propensities.
The ideal impulse appears, in comparison with this, a still small voice
which must be artificially reinforced to prevail. Effort is what reinforces
it, making things seem as if, while the force of propensity were essen-
tially fixed quantity, the ideal force might be of various amount. But
what determines the amount of the effort when, by its aid, and ideal
motive becomes victorious over a great sensual resistance? The very
greatness of the resistance itself. If the sensual propensity is small, the
effort is small. The latter is made great by the presence of a great antago-
nist to overcome. And if a brief definition of ideal or moral action were
required, none could be given which would better fit the appearances
than this: It is action in the line of the greatest resistance. (PP: 1155)
In those decisions characterized by effort our entire dimension of the self

is involved. The choice of a moral ideal over a situation less demanding
from a personal point of view is not a mere choice of contrasting motives,
but represents rather a commitment to assume a certain perspective
on the self, through which the self gives voice to the strenuous stance
guiding its will. In these types of decision, the task of the will is to keep
a firm grasp on the hardest option, often represented by an ideal, by an
act of attention:
In action as in reasoning, then, the great thing is the quest of the right
conception. The concrete dilemmas do not come to us with labels
gummed upon their backs. We may name them by many names. The
wise man is he who succeeds in finding the name which suits the
needs of the particular occasion best. (PP: 1139)
A common feature of the different types of decisions James surveys is the

idea that the will consists in paying attention to the way we conceive a
certain situation and to the way in which such situation is connected
with our most intimate practical cravings. James thinks, in fact, that
it is only in this way that our actions and conducts can be genuinely
expressive of our subjectivity, and of the way in which we see and value
things. The notion of interest thus indicates the practical nature of our
mind, since it portrays human beings as agents perpetually engaged in
evaluating and assessing the various aspects of reality that strike their
attention. Active interest, and the actions springing from it, denotes
the intentional nature of our mental life, that can be honored or rather
mortified depending on the appreciation or the denial of its active
contribution in the process of experience and decision.
If in each kind of decision the function of the will is to choose the best
of various (real or only imagined) possibilities, from the point of view
of our apprehension and conceptualization of the situation at hand, it
is only the hardest choices (and most interesting from a moral point of
view) that are characterized by the active exercise of that effort of atten-
tion that makes choice both voluntary and morally relevant. In these
cases, in fact, the object of the will, and thus of decision altogether, is
not merely an option among others, but rather it is the self we become
through such a choice. James writes:
The feeling that the evidence is all in, and that reason has balanced
the books, may be either present or absent. But in either case we feel,
in deciding, as if we ourselves by our own willful act inclined the
beam; in the former case by adding our living effort to the weight of
the logical reason which, taken alone, seems powerless to make the
act discharge; in the latter by a kind of creative contribution of some-
thing instead of a reason which does a reason’s work. (PP: 1141)
These kinds of situation are the ones in which we are called for critical
decisions. In such situations the self moves in a territory that is devoid
of any pre-existent parameters that could help her in the choice, since it
is through choice that she fashions herself and her system of evaluation
altogether.19 James writes:
Whether it be the dreary resignation for the sake of austere and naked
duty of all sorts of rich mundane delights, or whether it be the heavy
resolve that of two mutually exclusive trains of future fact, both sweet
and good, and with no strictly objective or imperative principle of
choice between them, one shall forevermore become impossible,

while the other shall become reality, it is a desolate and acrid sort
of act, an excursion into a lonesome moral wilderness. If examined
closely, its chief difference from the three former cases appears to
be that in those cases the mind at the moment of deciding on the
triumphant alternative dropped the other one wholly or nearly out of
sight, whereas here both alternatives are steadily held in view, and in
the very act of murdering the vanquished possibility the chooser real-
izes how much in that instant he is making himself lose. (PP: 1141)
This characterization is reprised in the last chapter of PP on “Necessary

Truths and their Effect on Experience,” where, as we already saw in the
discussion of “Moral Philosopher,” James characterizes choices, decisions
and moral judgments as the hardest, but also most genuine, expressions
of the self: a self which, unable to make reference to any pre-existent
evaluative order, finds in itself the necessary resources and energies for
affirmation. This engaged attitude is for James twice as relevant from
a moral point of view. On the one hand, such an attitude prompts us
to partake in reality with an attention that allows us to appreciate real-
ity’s moral salience; on the other hand, an engaged attitude expresses a
personal transformation that has moral temper.
There is a heroic dimension to this process of transformation under-
gone by the self connected with this characterization of the will.
Affirming new ideals, and thus shaping one’s own character, implies
a strenuous resistance to the forces and inertia of one’s mental habits.
This heroic component of one’s will should be cultivated and exer-
cised so that we can use it when in need. As for the discussion of habit,
James speaks of an exercise on oneself which fashions one’s interiority,
described pragmatically as a focus of effort and commitment. The result
of such exercise is the formation of a self that is ready to will, choose
and act. James writes:
We measure ourselves by many standards. Our strength and our intel-

ligence, our wealth and even our good luck, are things which warm
our heart and make us feel ourselves a match for life. But deeper than
all such things, and able to suffice unto itself without them, is the
sense of the amount of effort which we can put forth. Those are, after
all, but effects, products, and reflections of the outer world within.
But the effort seems to belong to an altogether different realm, as if
it were the substantive thing which we are, and those were but exter-
nals which we carry. (PP: 1180–1)
This characterization of the self in terms of effort and attention is thus

the conclusion of the normative moral descriptions that James depicts in
the chapters of PP I have sketched in the past two sections. These descrip-
tions, beyond representing a compelling perspective which account for
some central aspects of our subjectivity, have important consequences
on the way we think and portray the point of moral reflection in a prag-
matic mood. From this picture we can draw some interesting considera-
tions on the nature of moral thought. In TT James writes:
Our moral effort, properly so called, terminates in our holding fast

to the appropriate idea. If, then, you are asked, “In what does a moral
act consist when reduced to its simplest and most elementary form?”
you can make only one reply. You can say that it consists in the effort
of attention by which we hold fast to an idea which but for that effort of
attention would be driven out of the mind by the other psychological
tendencies that are there. To think, in short, is the secret of will, just as
it is the secret of memory. This comes out very clearly in the kind of
excuse which we most frequently hear from persons, who find them-
selves confronted by the sinfulness or harmfulness of some part of
their behavior. “I never thought,” they say. “I never thought how mean
the action was, I never thought of these abominable consequences.”
And what do we retort when they say this? We say: “Why didn’t you
think? What were you there for but to think?” And we read them a
moral lecture on their irreflectiveness. (TT: 109–110)
Thinking, being a collective name for all these central aspects of our
subjectivity, is a moral act, since through it we decide what to attend to
and what to ignore. A moral problem, as James will show in some of his
other moral writings, might in fact assume the form of the accuracy of a
certain representation of the world, of our contribution to its formation,
and of the most apt conduct which that calls for. James writes in PP:
The indicative and the imperative moods are as much ultimate cate-
gories of thinking as they are of grammar. The “quality of reality”
which these moods attach to things is not like other qualities. It is a
relation to our life. It means our adoption of the things, our caring for
them, our standing by them. This at least is what it practically means
for us; what it may mean beyond that we do not know. (PP: 1173)
Through the exercise of attention and will we portray certain living

options as available to us, and we focus on particular aspects of the
world that would otherwise be lost as background noise, being in this

way indifferent to them. This is an epistemological, as well as an ethical,
problem: it means in fact excluding them from our epistemic and evalu-
ative horizon, and thus from our field of practical possibilities and moral
concern.
Self-constitution and its burdens
For James the formation and education of the self is achieved through
a cultivation of one’s epistemic and evaluative capacities – an activity
of moral significance itself. In this perspective ethics acquires the form
of the analysis of these ways of self-cultivation, with pragmatic anthro-
pology describing human beings from the point of view of what the
self makes of herself through a work on the self. From this perspective,
moral reflection, which invites us to refine the aspect of our subjec-
tivity, takes the form of the critical survey of the kinds of experience and
experimentation we can undertake in ordinary conduct. By offering us
a skilful and insightful phenomenology of our life of the mind, James
raises a number of issues about the various uses we can make of its
various aspects. Similar considerations hold as well for his discussion of
other aspects, which James presents from the point of view of their use
and working in the process of one’s self constitution.
What I find most interesting in this project is precisely how these
various threads contribute to the formation of the self when understood
as an ethical task, whose difficulties and complications, according to
James, should represent the very focus of moral reflection. Along these
lines Koopman states that:
James, following Emerson and anticipating Dewey and Rorty, thought

of ethics in terms of reflexive processes of self-transformation, self-
development, and self-perfection ... . The freedom and the willing
involved in transforming ourselves on the basis of nothing greater
than our own selves, which of course would be selves which always
find themselves in the midst of others to whom they are given, is the
beginning of an ethics that would be exceptionally well-oriented to
the task of living well in our ever uncertain world. (Koopman forth-
coming: 26)
I find this interpretation compelling, and read James’s phenomenology

of the life of the mind as a presentation of those elements of our subjec-
tivity that we should educate through a work on ourselves. The use and
appropriate exercise of our subjectivity constitute the most genuine

expression of our engaged stance toward reality, in which our interiority,
by giving voice to its various aspects, makes the world a hospitable place
for meaningful conduct and practice. This process involves a revolution
of the self, in which we waken those aspects of our subjectivity from
the torpid state in which they tend to fall when not exercised by a daily
training and use them to face experience and its challenges in original
and enriching ways.
The desired outcome of the exhortative register pervading the text
is thus an invitation to engage in a process of self-fashioning that has
the character of a revolution of the self: a transformation of the way of
living our lives and the experiences articulating them. If read as a text-
book of descriptive psychology, rather than as a philosophical survey
of the kind of work necessary to constitute one as a subject, we would
miss the radical character of PP, perpetuating in this way the founda-
tional narrative which James is resisting in the text. James is interested
in surveying and assessing the kind of relationships we can entertain
with our subjectivity, and the burdens of our edification as moral indi-
viduals. What makes us participate in the moral life is not our nature of
being, made in a certain way, but rather the work that we dedicate to
forge ourselves in the course of experience.
According to James there is a common menace haunting both our
mental and our moral lives: it is our tendency to portray those as fields
in which our personal contribution is unnecessary; or worse, unwel-
come. While in the psychological case this leads to an understanding
of the mind as a given and of our stance toward experiencing as a
passive one, in the ethical case it leads to a picture of moral life as the
dead respect of rules and principles, conceived independently of any
personal contribution. These companion attitudes lead to mental and
moral conservatism: two tendencies of the human soul that, according
to James, attentive philosophical reflection should individuate, explore,
and finally eradicate.
There is another vital field in which such tendencies overlap and
sustain each other. In his characterization of the practices of knowledge
James shows an impoverished understanding of our commerce with the
world, in which our sensibility is neither consulted nor welcomed, and
brings a contraction of our subjectivity that is of moral significance. This
picture prevents us from appreciating large provinces of moral salience
we encounter and create in our ordinary practice. This theme, articu-
lated in some other moral texts, is also detectable in James’s writings on
truth; which will be the topic of the next chapter.
4
Truth, Experience, and the World
Re-Enchanted
Detecting the presence of moral considerations in James’s writings on

pragmatism (P and MT) is not an easy task, nor it is to understand the
relevance of the views stated there for the discourse of the nature and
stakes of moral reflection as approached in other texts. This has to do
both with the inner complexity of James’s work on truth, and with an
entrenched interpretation which has been mostly deaf to the ethical
stakes of such texts. In P, James presents pragmatism as a method and as
a genealogical conception of truth, which scholars have been inclined
to read as a defense of a peculiar substantive theory of truth only, down-
playing the methodological dimension of his pragmatism and missing
as a consequence the ethical dimension of such characterization, as well
as its strategic importance for the understanding of other parts of his
moral thought.1 As in the past two chapters I shall thus take issue with
some entrenched interpretive assumptions and resist a well-established
narrative recounting of his work: this time I shall question on the one
hand the reading of James’s position as a (subjectivist) theory of truth,
while on the other the companion understanding of some moral essays
informed by this alleged theory as articulating further details of his
substantive ethical views.
In my reconstruction these two philosophical moves speak to each
other, since by appreciating the ethical dimension of P and MT along anti-
foundational lines one might attain a different angle on those consid-
erations suffusing some other moral writings, in which the concept of
truth plays a central (though not foundational) role. In fact, once we
have discarded the reading of James’s reflections on pragmatism as a
theory of truth, and understood them rather as a survey of our practices
of world-making and their reflective stakes, we shall appreciate in which
sense the ways we face experience is an activity of ethical significance.
159
Conversely, if read in the light of such reflections and considerations,

we will find a novel perspective on those moral essays in which James
thematizes the issue of the nature of our encountering the world as an
activity of moral significance.
As I shall illustrate, it is James himself who established some robust
connections between ethics and truth in his writings of pragmatism.
The interpretive strategy that I will pursue to bring this moral register
to light is that of paying attention to the way in which James presents
his considerations on truth and experiencing. Far from being interested
in advancing respectively a definition of truth and a theory of ethical
knowledge, in his writings on pragmatism (P, MT) and in some moral
works (mostly the ones collected in the second part of TT) James surveys
our practices of truth and our ways of experiencing, and criticizes some
underlying assumptions and tendencies that are relevant for ethics.
In his characterization of truth and experience James argues how a
representational understanding of our worldliness, that is one in which
the self is depicted as a passive spectator and the mind as a mirror or
nature, has ramified moral consequences. This picture in fact impedes in
the acknowledgment and appreciation of large provinces of moral sali-
ence that we encounter in (and create through) our ordinary practices of
world-making, thus obscuring the working on the self which is at play
in their unfolding. In the aforementioned texts James is interested in
exploring the shortcomings and danger of portraying our practices of
moral evaluation as informed by a narrow and unimaginative picture
of truth and experiencing. In presenting those texts, I am interested in
stressing how in them James articulates what I have been presenting
as the leitmotiv of his moral thought: namely, the hortatory register
informing the therapeutic and transformational conception of philo-
sophical activity, and the companion assessment and rethinking of the
relationship of moral reflection with the moral life.
In the particular context of the writings I shall present in this chapter,
James advances a sophisticated criticism of some ordinary and reflective
descriptions and accounts of our modes of affording us the world, thus
challenging the way in which we understand and portray our experi-
encing as an activity that may or may not involve the expression of our
subjectivity – which we nurture and experiment with in our ways of
encountering with the world and our fellow beings. Specifically, James
is interested in exhibiting how the spectator picture of our practices of
truth is potentially threatening for the appreciation of large portions
of experiences that are of ethical significance, and inviting us to chal-
lenge it and replace it with an agential one that would allow us to gain a
Truth, Experience, and the World Re-Enchanted 161
profitable perspective from which appreciating the world as enchanted

with human values and meanings. This accomplishment requires,
according to James, a renegotiation of the importance of the vocabu-
lary of subjectivity and conduct for the establishment of a meaningful,
value-laden and engaged relationship with the world.
As will become progressively clear, for James this shift from representa-
tion and mirroring to conduct and action in the way we picture our expe-
riencing is itself of ethical significance in its eliciting a particular work of
the self on the self: by shifting from representational talk to conduct talk
James aims at putting the active expression of one’s subjectivity at the
center of our practices of truth and experiencing – a maneuver grounded
in a renewed attention and appreciation of the practices historically
defining and shaping our being in the world. In this context moral
reflection aims at surveying and exhorting those personal adjustments
and workings necessary for attaining such an enriched concept of expe-
rience, in which the truths we live by are expressive of our point of view,
and in which the appreciation of values is portrayed as dependent on
the capacity to assume an engaged stance toward the world. The gist of
this discourse is the exploration of our practices of truth and experience
as activities of moral significance against which we fashion ourselves
and give voice to our subjectivity.
According to my reading, James claims truth to be an engaged mental
state and practical stance we might assume in regards to the world, one
in which we are actively involved in the reality of a situation which
we find worthwhile and thus are interested in entertaining in our lives.
Unlike sheer “wish” or “whim,” “interest” has a normative grounding in
how things are in the world, not just in how we would like them to be:
James invites us to think normativity as internal to our practices of expe-
rience and not as an ideal to be found outside and imposed on them,
as an expression of our responsibility rather than an avoidance of it.2
Truth would thus consist in what is interesting for us to notice, in what
is worth (and not merely convenient) having, and requires an active
endorsement and commitment on the part of the epistemic subject,
who must pay attention to the complexity of reality, as it is displayed in
her ordinary practices of world-making, and take responsibility for such
outlook.
Once freed from both the assumption that truth has to do with the
passive representation and registration of states of affairs, and the oppo-
site but analogously unsatisfying and dangerous supposition according
to which truth is nothing but the expression of our arbitrary prefer-
ences, which goes onto the world from our minds – both described by
James as driven by the very same dualistic picture of knowledge – James

opens the way for a new fecund understanding of truth as an engaged
exercise of our sensibility in which what is at stake is the acknowledge-
ment and care of those portions of the world which call for active inter-
vention – rather than neutral representation or willful projection – on
our behalf. For James, this process requires a change in attunement with
the world and with one’s fellow inhabitants that calls for (and has the
form of) a transformation of the self. Experiencing becomes the prime
ethical activity in the measure in which it involves our inventive and
responsive capacities.
The nature and place of truth in ethics
The theme of truth and its bearing on ethics has been central in moral
philosophy: any attempt to summarize it in a few paragraphs would
be nothing short of a hopeless task. Not only this has been in point
of fact one of the most heated philosophical and cultural topics since
the modern age, but, furthermore, the twentieth and not twenty-first
century witnessed an increasingly specialized and technical literature
of which it is hard to grasp a coherent picture. In surveying James’s
distinctive outlook on such nagging topic I aim at placing him in the
midst of such debates, if only to show the differences in content as well
in approach and tone: James’s critical observations, as well as his most
positive views on the matter, do not fit easily with the mainstream liter-
ature on the topic, showing the difficulty and danger of reducing his
position to any of the ones now available on the intellectual market and
regularly compared to his.
This peculiar situation has to do both with the radical character of
James’s overall critical interest in such issues, of which I myself shall
offer a heterodox account, and most importantly with his methodology
and overall aims. Concerning the peculiarity of James’s conception in
respect of mainstream treatments, while truth-talk in ethics has been
customarily associated with the account of the nature of moral knowl-
edge or of the ontological status of moral claims, in James it acquires
a richer significance, referring to the wider discourse of the conditions
and dynamics of our meaningful grasp of reality and the consequences
in the way we depict our subjectivity. For what instead regards the
distinctive modality in which James articulates his views, what I find
most instructive in his work is the problematization of certain ways of
framing the very question of the nature and place of truth in ethics. In
fact, as with the other aspects of his philosophical production, I do not
read James as advancing any substantive theory of truth to be applied in

the ethical domain – which, as we started to appreciate in the previous
chapters, according to James, can be hardly be restricted to what moral
philosophers customary thought of it. When in fact James discusses the
pragmatic conception and meaning of truth his prime interest is that of
surveying the use of, and life with, this central concept: that is, when
James quarrels about the character of truth statements or the validity
of truth judgments, he is not trying to uncover the alleged essence of
truth but rather aiming at disclosing the various assumptions and conse-
quences of endorsing a certain philosophical picture of truth. If this
is the case, then the moral relevance of truth so conceived would lie,
not in its ontological or semantic implications, but rather in its wider
consequences for the way we understand the working of such concept
in our lives. Both Seigfried (1990b) and Cormier (2001) have labeled this
approach to truth as a “genealogical” as opposed to “logical” analysis:
a history of truth and its consequences (what truth does and might be
doing) rather than an account of its alleged essence in the abstract (what
truth would amount to).
It has to be noted that the two features of James’s treatment of truth –
its wider scope and its metaphilosophical motivations – are intertwined:
what makes James’s conception different is exactly on the one hand
the departure from narrow epistemological considerations; and, on the
other, the refutation of any foundational discourse about such a notion.
Obviously, in defending his pragmatist conception of truth as against
other philosophical pictures James is interested in promoting a certain
view of our mindedness and worldliness – one grounded in our ordinary
practices and resisting the temptations of those intellectualistic pictures
according to which in knowledge and experiencing no active involve-
ment from the part of the subject is called for. That is, in assessing the
various competing accounts of truth James does not hide his prefer-
ence for one picture over others. But he does that by assessing their
respective concealed assumptions and presuppositions and their wider
consequences and uses, and not by advancing a theory or proposing a
definition which would capture the alleged essence of such a concept.
Seigfried (1990b: 279–80) notes this point as the pitch of James’s anti-
intellectualistic outlook, and yet she still presents James’s pragmatic
alternative as a “theory” rather than as a conception or an attitude.
Seigfried makes a distinction between practice-based theories and abso-
lutes-based theories: it is congenial to mark a difference between theo-
ries working as incentives and tools for further research (plans for action
showing how realities might be differently envisioned or changed) and
theories working as conversation stoppers (formulas allegedly disclosing

the inner nature of things) (see e.g. P: 32). Despite finding the distinc-
tion compelling – in its indicating the Jamesian reconstruction of both
rationalism and empiricism as two live options and his presentation of
pragmatism as a congenial mediator between the two – I prefer to avoid
the vocabulary of theory and its customary association with substantive
doctrine, unified system, and positive resolution – as against practical
orientation, piecemeal elucidation, and methodological consideration.3
This (twofold) difference in the way of thinking about truth and
arguing for such conception is extremely significant in order to appre-
ciate the ethical bearings of this pragmatic characterization. Rivers of
ink have been spilled on James’s pragmatic understanding of, and reflec-
tion on, truth. At the risk of appearing disingenuous, or worse presump-
tuous, I shall not try to provide an account of and discuss the many
interpretative twists featuring the relevant literature in any detail, and
will rather proceed straight to a selective survey of P and MT in order
to sort out those central insights of James’s position that are congenial
to the larger point I am making in the present work. Nevertheless, I
shall refer to, and take issue with, some representative interpretations
of James’s remarks on truth: with respect to the issues discussed in the
previous chapters, my discussion of the secondary literature will relate
to the reconstruction I am sketching in this work and will thus not be
driven by any pretense of exhaustiveness. Still, I think that the “ethical
path” through which I shall recount and articulate James’s notion of
truth represents a major strand in his overall pragmatist conception of
truth and illuminates portions of his larger cultural project of bringing
our philosophical notions back to their experiential and practical
grounds. This is the hidden part of James’s conception that I am inter-
ested in bringing to light and defend, as against those reconstructions
that obscure our appreciation by forcing James’s texts in a direction that
he explicitly resisted in those very pages.
Given the radical character of my interpretation, and similarly to what
happened in the past chapters, I am afraid that much of the literature on
James’s pragmatic notion of truth will be deemed as unsatisfactory, not
so much in its detail and particular remarks – which are in some cases
illuminating if read in the right key – but rather because it is unfocused in
respect to what I take are James’s overall metaphilosophical intents. This
would, for instance, explain the disconsolate preface to MT (echoed in
the essays “A Word More About Truth,” “Professor Pratt on Truth,” and
“The Pragmatist Account of Truth and its Misunderstandings”), in which
James denounces some of the criticisms of the pragmatist conception:
as either off-target with respect to his wider cultural concerns, missing

its methodology and argumentative strategy, or in disagreement over
fundamental issues. James’s preface voices once again his disappoint-
ment in registering the underlying craving to champion some positive
theory of truth over others as the proper intellectual attitude which
philosophers must assume when engaging in reflective thinking on such
a central concept.4
By surveying the intertwinement of James’s methodological remarks
and his most positive views on truth, I shall argue how his reflection on
truth, sketched in P and MT, is very instructive if drawn next to other,
apparently unrelated, aspects of his moral thought. The productive
tension between critical and positive remarks about truth is most notice-
able in those texts where James is both presenting (his) pragmatism as
a method consisting in “no particular results, but only an attitude of
orientation” having “no dogmas, and no doctrines save its method,”
and suggesting, within such a pragmatist perspective, his most positive
(although not substantive) views about the ways in which a novel and
most satisfactory conception of truth and experiencing can be envi-
sioned, explored, and eventually achieved.
I shall claim that the rhetoric of such texts is in fact always one of
critical reconstruction and exhortation, rather than conclusive assertion
or justification. Once more, and in line with his wider metaphilosoph-
ical views, far from pontificating from the perspective of a well-refined
theory, James invites us to look, and look better, at our ordinary prac-
tices of truth so to question and challenge our responses to them and
possibly change them from the inside, thus prompting us to adjust our
modes of reaction, as well as change our expectations, to what philo-
sophical reflection might do for us. In James’s discussion of truth and
experience all these elements and instructions blend together to shape a
consistent outlook, and it is my claim that only by giving them the right
prominence (and in some cases unpacking the dense prose in which
they are presented) shall we fully appreciate the ethical bearings of such
characterization.
The metaphilosophy of truth
My heterodox reading of James’s conception of truth calls for a short

detour through, and hopefully a clarification of, the metaphilosoph-
ical dimension of his characterization. As already noted, one of the
most nagging issues regarding James’s conception of truth is the one
about its very nature and goals. The secondary literature has almost
unconditionally agreed that James in (roughly the second part of) P

advanced a theory of truth, which he then defended and perfected in
MT, furthering its detail and scope. But did James advance anything of
the sort?
The legitimacy of this questioning is justified by the great variety of
answers (and confusion of comments) that has characterized the discus-
sion of James’s pragmatist conception of truth since its first appearance.
I shall here limit myself to presenting the boundaries of the debate, so as
to highlight those aspects relevant for the understanding of the bearings
of James’s conception of truth for his moral philosophy. I will be very
selective with regards to the many aspects of James’s conception, giving
prominence to some of them at the expense of others, that I read as
either elaborating similar considerations or performing other tasks, and
are of less interest for the purposes of this chapter. James’s conception
of truth is in fact a sprawling topic; James weaves together a number of
issues and themes, with the purpose of showing the capacity of prag-
matism to rethink many central philosophical notions that have been
artificially distinguished from each other – thus, in some cases at least,
segmenting the wholeness and complexity of the problems at stake.
The discussion of James’s writings on truth characterized a good
portion of the philosophical discussion of the first decades of the twen-
tieth century, and, even if at a reduced pace, still represents a heated
topic in the contemporary intellectual landscape. In fact, not only prag-
matism’s scholars, particularly interested in placing James’s views in a
wider pragmatist narrative, but also philosophers and cultural critics
belonging to different traditions, have engaged with and scorned alike
the richness and alleged looseness of his texts on truth and method.
To mention only the most obvious connection, the dialogue between
analytic philosophy and pragmatism has been centered on the ques-
tion of the stature and validity of James’s conception of truth, featuring
virtually all the phases of such philosophical conversation. Russell and
Moore fervently attacked James, reading in P the defense of an identi-
fication of truth with the mere psychological satisfaction of the epis-
temic subject. Such authors in fact accused James (together with F. C.
S. Schiller and Dewey) of confusing the psychological criterion of truth
with its philosophical meaning.5 Logical empiricists praised instead
the epistemological aspect of the pragmatic method of assessing truth,
reading in it a rough version of the neopositivist criterion of signifi-
cance, while criticizing James’s formulation for its lack of precision and
logical detail.6 Ordinary language philosophy focused instead on the
most practical outcomes of the pragmatic characterization of truth, in
which it read a congenial critique of some philosophical dichotomies

its members opposed with kindred arguments. Also, pragmatism’s stress
on the consequences and fruits of one’s philosophical conceptions was
read as a forceful statement of the importance of setting back the philo-
sophical discourse on the rails of ordinary and concrete usage of words
and concepts.7 The latest revival has been a new wave of deflationism
and expressivism, sharing with pragmatism the thesis on truth as either
a mere tributary term or the expression of one’s endorsement of a situ-
ation and outcome.8
Despite their diversity and divergences, these various approaches
and interpretations share the undisputed assumption that, in his work,
James offered a full-fledged definition and theory of truth, variously
greeted with praise for its strengths or criticism of its shortcomings.
This assumption found favorable soil in the succeeding waves of schol-
arly literature, which, except for some rare cases, read in P and MT the
essentials of James’s philosophical theory of truth. Most scholars and
interpreters in fact agreed that the most original contribution of these
works was the sketch of a substantive account of truth, with pragmatism
representing the methodological background of such theory. According
to this reconstruction, the pragmatic characterization of truth has to be
read in the light of James’s substantive positions advanced in the book:
in P and MT James was trying to substitute one philosophical account
of truth with another, sharing with the ones he was criticizing the goal
of offering a unique model through which to explain the nature and
working of such a concept. What should one ask before attempting such
an interpretative exercise, is what James was asking through tackling the
issue of truth in the peculiar way he did.
My contention is that the attempt to reduce James’s position to a
few formulas allegedly catching its theoretical principles represents
precisely the first and foremost impediment to the appreciation of its
deeper philosophical motivations and point. The various criticisms that
have been advanced to his reflections on truth have spent most of their
energies trying to compare one bit of formulation with another – in
most cases assessing them against the latest debate – without however
analyzing the wider metaphilosophical framework against which such
formulations make sense, or bothering to ask themselves whether James
would have shared the whole drift that truth-talking took in contem-
porary philosophical reflection. In fact, those authors who most atten-
tively tried to understand the details of James’s theory found it variously
eclectic, admittedly confused, somewhat ingenuous, and even largely
inconsistent. A number of works thus tried to strengthen it, suggested
improvements, proposed amendments, intimated substantial revisions,

or denounced its hopelessness.9
Against such a reconstruction, we have being witnessing a rise of
dissenting voices that questioned the interpretation of James’s concep-
tion of truth in terms of a unified theory.10 Being sympathetic with
such heterodox approach, I read the plurality of voices and dialectical
layers detectable in James’s writings on truth as intentional and consti-
tutive of a certain way of presenting the pragmatist views, and as such
they should be interpreted as a conversation between diverse voices
conveying various (converging) points of view and attitudes to truth.
According to this view, the “pragmatist philosopher” often recurring in
the texts would be only one of the actors in the philosophical play,
and by identifying with such a voice James tries to communicate to
the reader the advantages, and in a certain sense the reasonableness,
of viewing things in the way pragmatism suggests as against opposite
ways – making extensive reference to our commonsensical and philo-
sophically unbiased ways of looking at truth.
This way of proceeding – itself an instance of the pragmatist method
of tracing the validity of a certain philosophical conception or picture
by making reference to the practical and vital consequence that its
endorsement would imply – gives voice to a certain mode of under-
standing the place of truth in our practices of world-making: that is, a
certain way of describing its functioning in our ordinary and reflective
life. This conception of the nature and goals of philosophical investiga-
tion, which we have already seen at work in the past chapters, represents
an alternative to the mainstream conception in terms of the advance-
ment of substantive philosophical theories. In a way similar to that in
which James thought moral reflection and psychological inquiries to be
proceeding, his philosophical reflection on the concepts of truth and
experience is conducted with the goal in mind to show their weight in
our ordinary practices, as well as to disclose the reflective assumptions at
play in a certain way of thinking about those practices.
I suggest we should therefore read those texts in which James speaks
about truth, not as references to (and endorsements of) an epistemo-
logical theory, but rather as recommendations about possible ways of
understanding such a central concept in a fashion that is enriching
for the business of our ordinary and reflective lives. It is in this sense
that James encourages us to explore the pragmatic picture of truth and
experiencing that, once seen in such light, takes a very different shape
from the one usually recounted. I thus claim that it is precisely at this
methodological level that we should be placing James’s reflections and
thus appreciate their philosophical point and originality. In this respect

Yemina Ben-Menahem (1995) speaks of a non-revisionist conception of
truth in James: that is, a piece of philosophical criticism (in a therapeutic
mood) of rival philosophical positions rather than a piece of revision of
our ordinary practices.
In these texts we find at work pragmatism, understood as a method
of philosophical clarification, that banishes theoretical explanations
and prescriptions in order to make space for critical descriptions of
our reflective and ordinary practices: “to attain perfect clearness in our
thoughts of an object,” James famously claimed “we need only consider
what conceivable effects of a practical kind the object may involve –
what sensations we are to expect from it, and what reactions we must
prepare” (P: 29). From this perspective, the pages dedicated to the discus-
sion of the pragmatic conception of truth should be read as a sketch of
the diverse possible stances and understanding that we might have (and
actually do) of this central concept, which should not be assessed in
abstracto but rather from the point of view of their practical strengths
and shortcomings. What James is interested in is thus not advancing a
theory of truth himself, but rather using pragmatism to unstiffen our
views on truth and put them to work.
James Conant explores the anti-theoretical dimension of James’s work
in a compelling direction by focusing precisely on the way such a register
informs his pragmatic conception of truth.11 Through an attentive and
imaginative reconstruction of James’s long-standing querelle with Royce
over pragmatism and absolute idealism, Conant argues how James arrived
at formulating pragmatism, and in particular pragmatic truth, as a (meth-
odological) conception rather than as a (positive) theory, where this
terminological and conceptual difference is of no small significance and
makes itself all the (pragmatic) difference (Conanat 1997: 186–7). Conant
carefully reconstructs the seminal, multi-layered exchanges between the
two philosophers, showing how James’s responses to Royce’s attacks on
pragmatism (and in particular on its internal inconsistency) result in an
explicit refutation of characterizing his conception of truth as a theory,
and instead depicted it as a live attitude one should cultivate in one’s
intellectual practices. Let me briefly reconstruct this line of argument.
Royce accused James’s pragmatist conception of not being able – that
is, of not having the internal conceptual resources – to distinguish truth
from its mere appearance (driven e.g. by considerations of conven-
ience), thus violating common sense, which James often invokes as
a litmus test for the validity and thus acceptability of a certain posi-
tion, defending such distinction. The other unwelcome consequence of
James’s position, denounced by Royce, is that, because of its own credo

about the refutation of any criterion for assessing the truth and false-
hood of a certain statement external to the perspective of the subject
inquiring and voicing it, James’s pragmatism would not be able to
consistently claim that its own theory of truth is itself true (frustrating
the very possibility to formulate itself coherently), as it could at most
suggest that it would be useful to be believed – thus frustrating once
again our commonsensical sensibility in distinguishing between what is
truth and what merely useful. In this way, not only would pragmatism
jeopardize any robust notion of objectivity and commit to a form of
solipsism, but it would also prove itself to be an unconceivable – because
inherently self-refuting and unsayable – position.
In presenting and commenting on the textual evidence of such
exchange – at once polemical and fraternal – Conant carefully argues
how, after years of struggling with such lines of criticism, James eventu-
ally accepted their validity, and yet eluded and bypassed these critiques
by claiming that his intention was, in fact, not to advance a theory or
propositional definition of truth to be proved true, but rather only to
suggest a certain possibility to be put to work and explored in one’s own
life. By presenting pragmatism as that living mental attitude in which
truth is tested ambulando rather than as a theory to be affirmed, James
addressed at once the charge of subjectivism and self-refutation, rede-
scribing at the same time the very seat and burdens of objectivity.12
In a chapter of MT on “The Pragmatic Account of Truth and its
Misunderstanders,” James replies to some of the criticisms addressed to
his pragmatist conception of truth (mostly a reaction to the second part
of P), which significantly he considers as misunderstandings of his own
outlook – rather than, e.g. genuine alternatives to it. What is noteworthy
is that James is very clear about his critic’s missing the whole point of his
views and dialectics, so that their disagreement would not be one of detail,
but rather of the overall perspective voiced by James in his writings:
My ideas might well deserve refutation, but they can get none till
they are conceived of in their proper shape. The fantastic character
of the current misconceptions shows how unfamiliar is the concrete
point of view which pragmatism assumes ... The critics have boggled
at every word they could boggle at, and refused to take the spirit
rather than the letter of our discourse. This seems to show a genuine
unfamiliarity in the whole point of view. (P: 99)
According to James such misunderstandings are to be explained by

the radical character of the pragmatist approach and conception that
his opponents fail to grasp – even though (at least according to James)
pragmatism represents the voice of the ordinary and the common
sense, which we tend to disregard under the pressure of a more stable
foundation of our concepts and practices. The replies to some of these
misconceptions help us understand what James is trying to do, and to
convey in his works, in particular in his writings on truth. James in fact
laments how most of the adverse fire directed at his views systematically
(or nearly so) missed the very target, given their refutation to “take the
spirit rather than the letter” of his philosophical investigations.
As Conant notes, the fifth misunderstanding, which reads “What
pragmatists say is inconsistent with their saying so,” voices precisely the
charge Royce advanced several times at James, accusing pragmatism of
not being able to prove the truth of its very theory of truth. The pragma-
tist position, says Royce, is similar to that of a skeptic compelling us to
believe in skeptical truth while not being (a coherent) skeptical about it.
James wisely replies that skepticism, or at least a “consistent” variety of it,
is not a doctrine but rather a “live mental attitude;” as a consequence, the
wise skeptic, in Conant’s words, “never puts his skepticism into a formal
proposition – he simply chooses it as a habit.” James thus adds that in a
similar vein pragmatism should not be read as a doctrine or theory, but
rather as a lively attitude and habit of mind that as such might be well
confuted by other attitudes and habits rather than killed by logic alone:
General skepticism is the live mental attitude of refusing to conclude.

It is a permanent torpor of the will, renewing itself in detail towards
each successive thesis that offers, and you can no more kill it off by
logic than you can kill off obstinacy or practical joking. This is why it
is so irritating. Your consistent sceptic never puts his skepticism into a
formal proposition – he simply chooses it as a habit. He provokingly
hangs back when he might so easily join us in saying yes, but he is not
illogical or stupid – on the contrary, he often impresses us by his intel-
lectual superiority. This is the real skepticism that rationalism have to
meet, and their logic does not even touch it. No more can logic kill the
pragmatist’s behaviour: his act of utterance, so far from contradicting,
accurately exemplifies the matter which he utters. (MT: 108).
Conant comments James’s rebuttal by claiming that:
In order to take up this line of defense, James must repudiate his

former ambition of formulating “a pragmatic Theory of truth – that is,
something which must assume a propositional form and the integrity
of which turns on its immunity to “instantaneous logical refutations.”
If he seeks to remain “irreproachably self-consistent,” the pragmatist

should restrict himself to proposing “a live mental attitude” that he
recommends we adopt, cultivate, and embody in the context of our
lives. (Conant 1997: 199)
According to James, the pragmatist conception of truth, far from

constituting a theory,13 represents rather a “challenge” to some accus-
tomed ways of thinking truth to be working: what he is delineating
and inviting us to assume and explore is not a substantive doctrine but
rather a certain attitude guiding our ordinary and reflective inquiries
and practices. Readers tend too easily to forget that throughout the text
James keeps repeating and showing how pragmatism is a tool to handle
theories and doctrines, and elucidate and assess themes by putting them
to work. Philosophical reflection conducted in a pragmatism swing uses
the material it finds already circulating in our discourses and activities in
a confused way, and tries to clarify them by showing their consequences
when cashed out in practice.
The pragmatist invites us to look more attentively to our practices
and write off the intellectualistic temptation to see them as governed
by criteria external to them – such as Royce’s absolute. The only appeal
available to the pragmatist, that is the only conceptual and methodo-
logical resource available to her if she wants to be faithful to her under-
standing of philosophical practice as a form of critical elucidation, is
to the practices she lives by and their possibility to be ameliorated by
means of a sound investigation of what is at stake in holding them true.
“What do with do with truth, and in the light of a certain truth?,” rather
than “what is the essence of truth?” should then be the focus of philo-
sophical inquiry: for James, the latter question, if it retains any meaning
and use at all, should be examined in the light of the former.
Conant quotes in this regard a very interesting passage, contained
in a note to the eighth type of misunderstanding according to which
“pragmatism is shut up in solipsism,” also a criticism raised by Royce.
James there states that the pragmatist can only state his views, but not
warrant them by sheltering them behind a theory allegedly catching
the essence and truth of the matter, so much that the wise pragma-
tist can propose its outlook “as something to be verified ambulando,
or by the way is which its consequences may confirm it” (MT: 114).
According to this way of understanding and presenting pragmatism,
James’s conception of truth is to be assessed in terms of the kind of
conduct it expresses and suggests we take. As Conant writes, James
“proposes pragmatism not as a theory (something which might be true
or false), but as a guide for action (something which might or might
not serve us well ‘in our conduct of the business of living’” (Conant
1997: 200). Conant glosses this metaphilosophical strategy by saying
that with such move James is wholeheartedly conceding to Royce that
in order to be a consistent pragmatist (a pragmatist all the way down,
one might say) one should abandon any pretension to demonstrate the
truth of its (alleged) theory by means of logical arguments altogether,
and rather limit oneself to showing the advantage of one’s outlook at
work. He writes:
To say that the justification for pragmatism can only emerge for a
person ambulando means that it can only emerge in the course of
a life informed by the pragmatist credo ... Pragmatism’s claim to our
allegiance turns on its being able to “earn its way” in “the theatre of
life” – its fruitfulness can only show itself within a human life and
cannot otherwise be demonstrated. A pragmatist therefore is – not
just someone who affirms a particular thesis after a chain of argu-
ment had convinced him of its truth – but rather a kind of person one
becomes through a particular way of life. (Conant 1997: 206)
This imaginative reconstruction of James’s understanding of pragmatism

underlying his conception of truth, according to which the pragmatist
is someone who reflects and behaves in a certain way and not someone
who advances a particular theory – where philosophy understood along
these lines consists in an invitation to think and conduct onself in a
certain way rather than in an attempt to build theories about a certain
topic – finds multiple confirmations in James’s writings, and yet it has
been very poorly received.
This anti-theoretical and instrumentalist dimension can be found
nicely stated in P in terms of the peculiar philosophical method prag-
matism expresses. In a well-known, but scarcely observed, passage James
writes that pragmatism:
Appears less as a solution, then, than as a program for more work,

and more particularly as an indication of the ways in which existing
realities may be changed ... No particular results then, so far, but only
an attitude of orientation, is what the pragmatic method means. The
attitude of looking away from first things, principles, ‘categories’, supposed
necessities; and of looking towards last things, fruits, consequences, facts.
So much for the pragmatic method! You may say that I have been
praising it rather than explaining it to you, but I shall presently
explain it abundantly enough by showing how it works on some
familiar problems. (P: 32)
James thus presents pragmatism as first and foremost a method, “praising

it rather than explaining it,” and yet he soon after adds that pragma-
tism has been read and understood as a theoretical account of truth. The
passage continues in fact with James stating that “meanwhile the word
pragmatism has come to be used in a still wider sense, as meaning also a
certain theory of truth.” However, far from endorsing such currency and
postponing the proper treatment of the pragmatist conception of truth
after a proper treatment of the pragmatist method, James briefly intro-
duces the pragmatist conception of truth as articulated by Schiller and
Dewey, whose humanism and instrumentalism comprised, not a theory of
truth, but rather (and this is something quite different), a “genetic theory of
what is meant by truth” (emphasis mine). James tells us a story about how
both our best scientific investigations and our common-sense attitude
toward reality speak in favor of the pragmatist picture of truth and expe-
riencing, showing how such sensibility is already at work in such intel-
lectual endeavors and practical dealings with the world. James points to a
certain use we make of the concept of truth, one variously at work in our
activities, rather than trying to impose one anew by means of theoretical
arguments. Those arguments, when available, are to be assessed against
the background of the particular genealogy of such concept: a history of
our uses and misuses of such concept to which to refer to criticize it and
possible improve it. In a telling if overlooked passage James remarks:
See the exquisite contrast of the types of mind! The pragmatist clings
to fact and concreteness, observes truth at its work in particular cases,
and generalizes. Truth, for him, becomes a class-name for all sorts of
definite working-values in experience. For the rationalist it remains a
pure abstraction, to the bare name of which we must defer. When the
pragmatist undertakes to show in detail just why we must defer, the
rationalist is unable to recognize the concretes from which his own
abstraction is taken. He accuses us of denying truth; whereas we have
only sought to trace exactly why people follow it and always ought
to follow it. (P: 38)
I claim that such an alternative criticizes precisely the intellectu-

alist temptation of constricting our ways of understanding truth in a
dogmatic theory, thus obscuring what really matters about this concept
(and why): that is, its being the expression of a certain (history of our)
attitude toward reality.14
This metaphilosophical theme features extensively James’s later publi-
cations on pragmatism and truth, mostly dedicated to a systematic
rebuttal of his critics and their less than fair (and intelligent) accusa-
tions. The evidence is here overwhelming, and yet still not taken into
consideration with the proper attention by the literature. Let me quote a
few passages out of a lengthy representative. In “Humanism and Truth,”
in replying to Bradley, James comments that pragmatism (or, rather,
“humanism”):
Is a kind of intellectual product that never attains a classic form of

expression when first promulgated. The critic ought therefore not to
be too sharp and logic-chopping in his dealings with it, but should
weigh it as a whole, and especially weigh it against its possible alterna-
tives. One should also try to apply it first to one instance, and then to
another to see how it will work. It seems to me that it is emphatically
not a case for instant execution, by conviction of intrinsic absurdity
or self-contradiction, or by caricature of what it would look like if
reduced to skeleton shape. Humanism is in fact much more like one
of those secular changes that come upon public opinion overnight,
as it were, borne upon tides ‘too deep for sound or foam,’ that will
survive all the crudities and extravagances of their advocates, that
you can pin down to no one absolutely essential statement, nor kill
by any one decisive slab” (MT: 39)
Significantly enough, James compares the pragmatic overcoming of

intellectualism to social and cultural turning points of humanity – such
as “the change from aristocracy to democracy, from classic to romantic
taste ... , [or] from static to evolutionary ways of understanding life.”
According to James any attempt to counter such general drift by means
of a few technical arguments looks as helpless as trying to “stop a river
by planting a stick in the middle of the bed.” Surely, such changes are
in part constituted and argued for by means of theses, but such theses –
never singular theories but rather holistic nets and pockets of argu-
ments – are embedded in wider pictures related to our historical human
ways of living, and of being situated rather than merely governed by
some disembodied process called “logic.” This shift thus looks more
like an overall rearrangement of forces than a sheer display of new facts
or valid conclusions. In “Humanism and Truth Once More,” a reply to
Joseph’s criticism, James further argues:
As I apprehend the movement towards humanism, it is based on no

particular discovery or principle that can be driven into one precise
formula which thereupon can be impaled upon a logical skewer ... The
one condition of understanding humanism is to become inductive-

minded oneself, to drop rigorous definitions, and follow lines of least
resistance ‘on the whole’. For humanism, conceiving the more ‘true’ as
the more ‘satisfactory’ (Dewey’s term) has to renounce sincerely recti-
linear arguments and ancient ideals of rigor and finality. It is in just this
temper of renunciation, so different from that of the pyrronistic skepti-
cism, that the spirit of humanism essentially consists. (ERE: 127–8)
James claims that the critics of humanism “have never imagined this atti-
tude inwardly, is shown by their invariable tactics:” that is, by refusing
to acknowledge the wider shift which pragmatism is suggesting, and
instead sticking to some restricted argument, pragmatism’s opponent is
not putting herself in a position to fairly understand pragmatism, thus
necessarily missing its own critical target.
In “The Essence of Humanism” – certainly an intended oxymoron –
James restates this very point, presenting the humanistic attitude
underlying his pragmatism (as well as Schiller’s and Dewey’s) as a “shift
in philosophical perspective” rather than as a “single hypothesis or
theorem.” James writes:
Humanism is a ferment that has ‘come to stay.’ It is not a single

hypothesis or theorem, and it dwells on no new facts. It is rather a
slow shifting in the philosophic perspective, making things appear as
from a new centre of interest or point of sight ... If humanism really
be the name for such a shifting of perspective, it is obvious that the
whole scene of the philosophic stage will change in some degree if
humanism prevails. The emphasis of things, their foreground and
background distribution, their sizes and values, will not keep just the
same. (MT: 70–1)
What is important to stress for the purpose of the present chapter is that
here James explicitly draws the ethical implications of the endorsement
of this attitude. In the note to the text quoted James in fact states that
“the ethical changes, it seems to me, are beautifully made evident in
Professor’s Dewey series of articles.”15 James characterizes the pragmatist
conception as a “ferment” or “long shifting” in philosophical perspec-
tive, refuting to characterize it as a “single hypothesis or theorem” –
as James adds, it is only the adversaries of pragmatism “who, scenting
heresies in advance, have showered blows on doctrines – subjectivism
and skepticism, for example – that no good humanist finds it necessary
to entertain” (MT: 71).
When thus James uses the term “theory” in reference to truth, and
this very rarely indeed, he is referring to the way the pragmatist account
has been understood by his detractors. After the publication of P James
read adverse reactions of all sorts, and in an attempt to make some order
in such a confusion of voices – not always a successful attempt, it has
to be said, as in some passages (perhaps out of distress) he seems to
be conceding to his detractors more than he should have had – James
offered some précis of his pragmatism. James writes:
Whoever will contribute any touch of sharpness will help us to make

sure of what’s what and who is who. Anyone can contribute such a
definition, and, without it, no one knows exactly where he stands.
If I offer my own provisional definition of humanism now and here,
others may improve it, some adversary may be led to define his own
creed more sharply by the contrast, and a certain quickening of the
crystallization of general opinion may result. (MT: 71)
Note that here James is willing to offer a “provisional definition” – a

working label of the kind he offers of “religion” at the beginning of VRE –
to start with (rather than a final word), with the purpose of fostering
further debate and most importantly clarifying and making explicit the
various positions and outlooks at play. This seminal aspect, not a small
detail, has been systematically overlooked, vitiating from the very begin-
ning the way in which a large representative of interpreters approached
his writings on truth. If read as a defense of a particular attitude, sensi-
bility and temperament, James’s pragmatist conception of truth would
acquire a depth and significance quite unlike the one conceded by those
scholars looking for a full-blooded theory in his texts.
If the literature, with rare exceptions, has been from the very
beginning oriented to read James’s account of truth as a defense of a
substantive theory, I aim at showing how James was interested instead
at offering a genealogical phenomenology of the diverse attitudes in
respect to the nature and place of such central philosophical concept.
From such a survey will emerge the diverse meanings and usages
featuring the various aspects of this concept. As for what regarded
“Moral Philosopher” or PP, I am in fact convinced that the kind of
reading one is willing to give of these texts influence the very compre-
hension of the kind of philosophical work that James is doing there.
The gist of their dialectics, as I shall argue, is nothing short of a radical
rethinking of the very meaning of truth in our lives and its place in
experiencing.
The practices of truth and the critique of intellectualism
In “Moral Philosopher” James has pictured the attitude we should

have in regards to our moral ideals and principles as an inventive
one. Discussing the psychological question James claimed that there
is an important sense in which moral notions are more the expres-
sion of new ways of seeing things than the fruit of past experience.
Regarding the metaphysical question he made a similar claim about
moral language having meaning and ground only when there is an
activity of live endorsement underlying its use. While concerning the
casuistic question James stressed the dangerousness of conceiving the
validity of our moral principles as lying outside our experiencing and
experimenting with them. Similar considerations, as we saw in the
past chapter, can be appreciated at work in PP, where James sketches a
picture of human beings as makers – rather than mere witnesses – of
their processes of self-edification and growth. By depicting individ-
uals as agents constantly engaged in exploring their own subjectivity
and testing it against experience through daily practices, James insists
once more on the vocabulary of activity and invention, as opposed to
passivity and representation. His conception of truth, far from being
at odds with such characterization of agency and subjectivity, can be
read as an elaboration of the insight according to which in order to
apprehend something as true we must take an inventive and engaged
stance.
In his 1907 Lowell lectures James dedicates most of his exposition to
the discussion of the pragmatist conception of truth and its relation to
experiencing. The leading thread that is relevant for my discussion of
the nature and place of truth in ethics is the characterization of truth as
that distinctive attitude and state of mind in which we are inventively
engaged in encountering the world and thus actively expressing and
exploring our distinctive perspective on things in experiencing. This
argumentative line is intertwined with the critical one investigating
the shortcomings and moral danger of an intellectualist conception of
truth and experiencing. Taken together the two lines reprise and expand
what James argued from a slightly different perspective both in “Moral
Philosopher” and in the psychological writings. Furthermore, some of
his other moral essays can be read as a celebration of the importance of
an inventive stance toward one’s and others’ truths in one’s reflective
and ordinary life. The theme of invention is thus central throughout
James’s philosophical work and informs in deep ways his ethical thought
from a variety of perspectives.
We owe to Henri Bergson one of the earliest sympathetic comments

and characterizations of James’s conception of truth. The two thinkers
developed a fecund intellectual collaboration during the last decade
of James’s life, interwoven with a strong friendship characterized by a
sincere reciprocal admiration. James dedicated more than a text to the
presentation and discussion of Bergson’s work – among which an entire
chapter of his unfinished intellectual history of philosophical systems.16
Bergson returned the favor by writing an essay that still represents a
most imaginative and helpful overall presentation of James’s pragma-
tism and radical empiricism. In this essay, written as the introduction
of the first French translation of P in 1911, Bergson presents James’s
pragmatism in the light of his conception of experience and truth. The
French philosopher focuses in fact both on James’s radical empiricism
and on his pragmatic characterization of truth in order to show their
lasting significance and break with the a large portion of the orthodox
philosophical tradition. Bergson sums up James’s conception of truth,
which he rightly sees as the key feature of his pragmatism and radical
empiricism alike, by saying that:
The difference between [James’s] conception of truth and the tradi-

tional one is plain to see ... The true, according to William James, does
not copy something which has been or which is: it announces what
will be, or rather it prepares our action upon what is going to be.
Philosophy has a natural tendency to have truth look backward: for
James, it looks ahead ... It seems to me one could sum up all that is
essential in the pragmatic conception of truth in a formula such as
this: while for other doctrines a new truth is a discovery, for pragmatism it
is an invention. (Bergson 1946: 183)17
According to the Bergsonian intuition there would thus be a central

dimension of the Jamesian conception of truth that makes reference to
the importance of an inventive involvement of the subjects with the
very truths they entertain, as opposed to the passive approach usually
depicted by traditional philosophy and advocated in different manners
by both classical empiricism and idealism. The reference to agency and
to the generative character of truth is here the key: for James truth-
talking would be future-oriented, inventive in character, and involve an
active participation (together a preparation and an intervention) of the
subject in experience through her thoughts and deeds.
These features are of the utmost importance for the reconstruction
of James’s hortatory characterization of ethics that I am defending
in this work as it represents the key to the central passages of those

moral writings in which James criticizes some foundationalist and intel-
lectualist conceptions of moral reflection and the moral life, such as
“On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings” and “What Makes a Life
Significant” – besides, obviously, “Moral Philosopher.” In fact, by char-
acterizing truth as an inventive mental state James’s critical target is the
picture of our practices of truth as devoid of any active involvement
by the subject engaged in them – who is rather described as a witness
passively registering the evidences to which she happens to be exposed.
In a central passage of P James fiercely attacks those representations of
truth characterizing our commerce with experience as petrified because
of our dead stance toward the truths there conveyed. James denounces
how too often, by characterizing truth as something that we “merely
find,” what is completely neglected is the personal contribution required
to entertain such truths in the first place and enjoy the related experi-
ences, a contribution which should not be alienated nor delegated to
forces and dynamics external to (and independent of) the exercise of our
sensibility in practice at loss of great portions of ethical meaning.
I therefore suggest that we read the characterization of truth in
terms of invention as motivated by criticism of those accounts that,
by depicting it in terms of mere discovery, systematically expunge our
personal contribution from the description of the ways in which enter-
tain such truths in the very first instance and invest them with meaning.
James suggests a radical change in the way we should be describing and
understanding the very concepts of truth and experiencing, a shift in
emphasis which has tremendous ethical significance and consequences.
There would be in James what one might call a perfectionist dimension
featuring the pragmatic depiction of truth as invention: namely, the
idea that in fabricating and achieving truth one opens up new possibili-
ties of experience which are expressive of one’s point of view on things,
as opposed to the sheer mirroring of a reality which is independent of us
and does not impinge on us. The pragmatic conception of truth aims at
a perspicuous description of our practices of truth as activities through
which we establish novel meanings and appreciate the ones already in
circulation. Also, by depicting truth in such agential and engaged terms,
James individuates a device to either help keeping such meaning alive
or rather dismissing them as unimportant because unreal. These, I shall
argue, are the larger philosophical stakes of James’s pragmatic concep-
tion of truth.
More recent interpreters of James have not failed to appreciate this
feature. Brennan for example stresses the inventive dimension of
James’s conception of truth, relating it to some central strands of his

moral thought. He offers a rather interesting account of James’s epis-
temological investigations as directly relevant for his moral thought.
Brennan is in fact convinced that James’s epistemological insights –
and not only his religious and metaphysical views – are particularly
relevant for moral reflection. In particular, Brennan individuates an
internal relationship between James’s epistemology and ethics in the
discussion of what James, in PP, calls necessary truths: that is, those
truths characterized by their inventive and generative quality, among
which James lists moral truths. The characterization of such truths can
be inscribed in the wider discourse of the radicalization of the concept
of experience that James elaborated in his writings, and which finds its
most congenial collocation in his later wrings on pragmatism. James
presents his pragmatism as a “perfectly familiar attitude in philosophy,
the empiricist attitude, but it represents it ... both in a more radical and
in a less objectionable form” (P: 31). Experience, according to this less
objectionable form of empiricism, is something that we do actively
rather than something we simply undergo passively, as what is at stake
in experiencing is precisely our positive contribution by means of effec-
tive interventions.
It is in this context that Brennan presents James’s conception of truth
in terms of invention as against the intellectualistic pictures that would
like it to be a sheer matter of unengaged mirroring:
Against the rationalist theory that truth is largely a matter of copying

reality, the pragmatist opposes the dynamic viewpoints that truth
consists both in a leading to reality by means of ideas and in a crea-
tion of new realities by truth itself ... In knowing, we do not merely
reproduce reality: in our cognitive as well as in our affective life we
are creative. In exercising this creative role, man chooses to attend to
certain limited aspects of reality to the exclusion of others. (Brennan
1961: 46–7)
Taking experiences as being more than mere appearances, [James]
finds values to be the most fundamental component of the universe.
In being loyal to experience, he is led to take values most seriously.
(Brennan 1961: 28)
These passages suggest a close intertwinement between epistemology

and ethics in James’s work: by characterizing truth as an inventive stance
toward reality in which we are perpetually selective, our experiencing
becomes an activity of moral relevance and salience as by downplaying
this engaged stance and activity we might unwittingly overlook those

very things that are important to attend in reality. By stating that some-
thing is true, and thus choosing to attend it in our practical horizon,
we in fact invest it with significance and value. James consequently
states how sometimes moral problems take the form of (and refer to)
precisely what to pay attention to and what to overlook in reality: our
very personal attitude and stance over reality thus becomes relevant in
the assessment of our practices of truth, seen as the very wells of our
ethical choice.
As we start to slowly navigate the seas of the pragmatic conception
of truth and experiencing, it is important to keep in mind that the
contraposition between invention and discovery that interpreters such
as Bergson and Brennan read in James should be understood as a clash
of philosophical pictures of which pragmatism is interested in drawing
the respective consequences. James’s concern is in fact that of marking
a difference between various ways of understanding and approaching
truth from the point of view of the kind of personal involvement at
work envisioned by the various philosophical pictures. James constantly
challenges the reader to question her own assumptions and sensibility
over the nature of truth by making reference to the wider implications
of the endorsement of a certain picture over the others. James utters
his own preference for a pragmatic conception depicting truth as an
invention, which he opposes to both realism and classical empiricism
depicting it as a discovery, but he recommends this picture by showing
both its practical advantage and its grounding in our ordinary practices.
Pragmatism, as we have seen already, is thus both a method for assessing
conflicting views and a particular anti-intellectualist outlook, promising
to keep closer to the general facts of life for their criticism and amelio-
ration than other philosophical pictures; pragmatism’s task is thus to
show how its endorsement (in this context, of a certain conception of
truth as invention) is at once more satisfying for, and/because descrip-
tive of, our ordinary practices.
James starts to patiently weave the plot of his pragmatic account
of truth by contrasting it with the intellectualistic picture: truth in
the actual, thus, rather than truth in the abstract, is the sole object of
concern for James while truth in the abstract is the real critical target.
This difference at the level of subject matter is internally related to
one at the methodological level between pragmatic accounts of what
is actually meant by true and intellectualistic theories about how to
best define it abstractly. However, far from refuting the intellectualistic
hypothesis by proving its theoretical inadequacy, he rather shows the
practical difficulties and shortcomings that the latter would bring to our
lives, thus its philosophical undesirability. In particular, James is inter-
ested in remarking a contrast between various attitudes that we might
have toward the truth of a certain philosophical option: by representing
it as the result of the application of principles established independ-
ently from the place it occupies in our practices one will have a radi-
cally different perspective from one representing it as the most evident
depositary of those “factual concrete differences” that its endorsement
brings on the conduct of those living in the light of it.
In this context James presents pragmatic truth as an inventive stance
we can take toward experience altogether, one in which we actively
commit to the reality of a certain experience due its capacity to bring
us into a satisfactory relation with the world. The pragmatic stance that
James is presenting and inviting us to explore (and eventually endorse by
showing how large portions of our ordinary life are already congenial to
it) describes truth as an engaged way at looking at experiencing: unlike
the intellectualistic one, the pragmatic stance suggests a way to consider
our practices of experience as activities involving the growth and refine-
ment of our subjectivity. According to this picture, truth expresses a
certain mood of facing experience in which we actively commit to the
meaningfulness of a certain reality depending on its capacity to bring us
in a satisfying relationship with ourselves and the world.
Given this first stab at a presentation of the pragmatic attitude, James
continues by questioning the meaning of such a “satisfying relation-
ship” with the world, how that might that be realized and the very
consequence of endorsing such picture:
Ideas (which themselves are but parts of our experience) become true just
insofar they help us to get into satisfactory relation with other pars of our
experience, to summarize them and get about among them by concep-
tual short-cuts instead of following the interminable succession of
particular phenomena. Any idea upon which we can ride, so to speak;
any idea that will carry us prosperously from any one part of our
experience to any other part, linking things satisfactorily, working
securely, simplifying, saving labor; is true for just so much, true in so
far forth, true instrumentally. (P: 34)
If reality itself is depicted in practical terms and individuated through the

truth-attitudes we might assume toward it – as James writes, “to a certain
degree ... everything here is plastic” – from a pragmatist point of view
our ways of world-making involves an active exercise of our subjectivity.
The subject becomes an agent constantly engaged in shaping the world

and making it a place hospitable for meaningful human activities. This,
however – as we saw extensively in the previous chapter when debating
the nature of the normative anthropological descriptions suffusing PP –
is not a piece of transcendental argumentation on how reality or human
nature work given some metaphysical principles inscribed in how things
are, but rather it is the outcome of a certain practical possibility about
how we conduct ourselves while experiencing. As James notes, in fact
such is the conception underlying our most successful activities, both
intellectual and ordinary. At this stage James is inviting us to acknowl-
edge how pragmatism is interested in describing the working of truth by
pointing to its current use. It is only when we disregard our practices in
favor of an alluring philosophical picture promising us that we go astray,
and thus incur major ethical trouble.
The picture James is resisting is one in which truth stands for the
static property of our thoughts to represent reality as we find it inde-
pendently of our human interests, demands and cravings. This picture
underlies the characterization of our stance toward reality as disengaged
and passive, and is for James a most threatening one:
The trail of the human serpent is thus over everything. Truth inde-
pendent; truth that we find merely; truth no longer malleable to
human need; truth incorrigible, in a word; such truth exists indeed
superabundantly or is supposed to exist by rationalistically minded
thinkers; but then it means only the dead heart of the living tree, and
its being there means only that truth also has its paleontology and
its ‘prescription’, and may grow stiff with years of veteran service
and petrified in men’s regard by sheer antiquity. (P: 37)
I take this to be one of the most important statements about truth as it

relates many themes at the heart of Jamesian pragmatism. Here James is
in fact voicing a concern haunting most of his work: namely, the threat-
ening character of those pictures of truth “grown petrified by antiquity”
because of our passive and deadening stance toward experience. Against
this characterization James advances a picture in which truth is the very
expression of our interests, demands and cravings. According to James
pragmatism transforms the absolutely empty notion of correspondence
in a rich and active relationship between our truths and the way in
which we can entertain them and thus engage the world. He contends
that ideas become true insofar as they are endorsed and lived by. Looking
at truth as something fixed and pre-established independently from our
personal contribution means pointing to its empty shelter, to the “dead

heart of the living tree.” Truth can petrify and the meaning of a certain
experience dissipate dependently on the kind of stance we are ready
to assume and endure toward reality, and thus, far from being imper-
meable to human practices, truth and experiencing represent for James
their immediate expression.
Pragmatism depicts truths in their dynamic relationship with our
subjectivity, which variously determines their meaningfulness or mean-
inglessness. As we shall see, this feature of truth has an ethical compo-
nent to it, and will in fact play a central role in those moral essays in
which James explores the moral stakes of/in experiencing. By depicting
the ways in which we arrive at shaping the truths we live as inventive,
James aims at stressing the creative and engaged character of our mind-
edness and worldliness in experiencing. Truth is something we do more
than something that is merely found. In this context James calls in cause
the equation between truths, goods, and values that many interpreters
found perplexing and problematic:
Truth is one species of good, and not, as is usually supposed, a category

distinct from good, and coordinate with it. The truth is the name of
whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for
definite, assignable reasons ... In this world, just as certain foods are not
only agreeable to our taste, but good for our teeth, our stomach, and
our tissues; so certain ideas are not only agreeable to think about,
or agreeable as supporting other ideas that we are fond of, but they
are also helpful in life’s practical struggles. If there be any life that
it is really better we should lead, and if there be any idea which, if
believed in, would help us to lead that life, then it would be really
better for us to believe that idea, unless, indeed, belief in it incidentally
clashes with other greater vital benefits (P: 42)
This is a pivotal and critical passage because among the most ridiculed
by James’s detractors, who read in the identification of truth with
convenience the central move of James’s theory, thus attack pragmatism
for its reduction of truth to the mere useful and profitable. Furthermore,
this reading has immediate ethical consequences. In fact these state-
ments have been brought by a large representative of interpreters as the
evidence of his moral philosophy being a form of hedonistic (at the level
of moral psychology) consequentialism (at the level of moral reasoning).
Since true ideas are those that either we are pleased to believe or it is
most convenient to have, critics say, then moral truths consist in what
we find it useful to obtain (with moral principles ordering and ranking

them).18
However, by paying attention to the wider textual background in
which this quotation is lodged, as well as to its very letter, one would
soon realize how James already silenced such a line of criticism, showing
how a pragmatist conception is able to make room for genuine objec-
tivity without committing to the ethically dangerous form of corre-
spondentism espoused by the rationalist mindset. Let me unpack the
last two dense quotations by pointing to other portions of the same text
often overlooked by scholars, so to open the way for a more imaginative
reading of such central statements and through some light on James’s
wider dialectic in these chapters.
James concedes that the pragmatist account could appear rather
unfeasible and clash with some entrenched common-sense intuitions;
but only if the truths of which it speaks are taken in the abstract sense:
that is, ungrounded in our concrete experiential claims. In fact, in that
case we would be in a position of having a number of truths in contrast
between each other and still all advantageous to be claimed – thus
“indulging in all kinds of fancies about a this world’s affairs, and all
kinds of superstitions about a world hereafter.” But, as James states soon
after, “it is evident that something happens when you pass from the
abstract to the concrete, that complicates the situation;” in fact, when
truths are made flesh and lodged in the concrete life of those enter-
taining them the biggest hindrance they could encounter are other truths
resisting them and fighting them: truths claimed by other human beings
or by ourselves at earlier times and engrained in our practices already.
Vindicating the human trail on our practices of truth would not commit
James to any idealistic epistemology, since he presents the footing of
truths as always grounded in our concrete experiencing. This point has
been overlooked and poorly so as James repeats it at nearly every page
of this chapter and repeats it again in MT.19
James speaks about a “plasticity” in our experiencing in which old
and new truths fight as opposed “working values” we throw at reality
to successfully lodge our activities and give them currency. The motif of
the conflict between past/established and novel/inventive truth plays
a central role in ethics, as we saw it thematized in the discussion of
the casuistic question in “Moral Philosopher.” Here instead the clash
is explored from the point of view of our ways of world-making: James
speaks about the never-ending scuffle between older and newer truths,
which he describes as fighting each other and merging into each other
in an unbroken negotiation with our subjectivity in action: “an outrée
explanation, violating all our preconceptions, would never pass for a

true account of a novelty ... New truth is always a go-between, a smooth-
er-over of transitions. It marries old opinion to new fact so as ever to
show a minimum of jolt, a maximum of continuity.” James adds that
the failure to appreciate the central role played by older truths is indeed
“the sources of much of the unjust cricitism leveled against pragmatism”
(P: 35), and a few pages later adds that pragmatism is well aware that
“truths have once for all this desperate instinct of self-preservation and
of desire to extinguish whatever contradicts them” (P. 43). The problem,
from a pragmatist point of view, is not much that of having a notion of
truth robust and hard enough to ground objectivity, but rather lies in
the opposite danger: of not being able to criticize and eventually replace
the truths we live by when they are no longer expressive of our subjec-
tivity and thus constrict and deaden it.
Furthermore, as James claims in the very quotation under attack, the
good is not the merely agreeable, thus silencing the other subjectivist
charge often leveled against pragmatism by depriving it of its main
polemical reference. This other overlooked feature once again refers to
the subjectivity of the epistemic and moral agent as the key factor in
the establishment and justification of truth. James invites us to look at
truth as the very expression and outcome of our conduct rather than
our mere sensitivity: in a manner similar to the way he preferred the
vocabulary of agency to that of mere passivity in PP (as we saw in Ch. 3),
here James depicts true ideas as those not only agreeable to think about
but rather practically helpful in our everyday struggles for meaning.
According to pragmatism, truth would help us lead our life in enriching
and successful ways, and not only in agreeable ones: like health and
strength truth it is made in the course of experience, and does not await
the subject – as we might say – at the end of the road with its blessing
but rather requires training and experimentation.
The good of truth is thus a function of its expressive (although not
expressivist) and subjective (although not subjectivist) character: that
is, it is the very outcome of our deeds and doings in practice. Conduct
would thus be the mark of truth, and not either passivity or projec-
tion. The two themes at play in the two previous full quotations that
I have remarked – truth’s seed of death and the centrality of inventive
conduct for its nourishment – can be read as two faces of the same prag-
matist coin, whose philosophical currency lies in its ability to depict, in
a lively way, what are the ethical stakes of truth: namely, the very gener-
ative character of our ways of world-making. Experiencing becomes,
for the pragmatist, a transitional commerce with reality in which we
compromise old and new truths for the sake of arriving at a satisfying
balance between the flights of our subjectivity and those of others. In
such unbroken practical negotiation we reinforce, transform, or rather
abandon the truths we live by, thus infusing our horizons of thought
and action with novel meaning.
The various truths we live by are part of a dynamic process of expe-
riencing at the hearth of our commerce with reality. According to this
genetic perspective, our truths are the expression of the particular atti-
tude we might assume toward reality, of which they describe those
features that are of interest for us. James’s polemic with intellectualism
and representationalism is thus not moved by the repudiation of reality
as a privileged reference of our assertions and judgments, but by the
refutation of a description of our dealings with it as a mere process of
mirroring or copying in which our active contribution is unwelcome. If
truth is therefore an expression of our ways of experiencing the world,
characterizing it in inventive terms means giving prominence to the
engaged stance at play in their undertaking.
In the chapter on common sense – which could be read as a celebra-
tion of ordinary activities and practices as the very ground and spring
of truth made humane and serving our meaningful experiencing –
James notes that “knowledge grows in spots,” and “new truths thus are
resultant of new experiences and of old truths combined and mutually
modifying one another” (P: 82–3). As against any form of dull repre-
sentationalism, James claims how our fundamental ways of thinking
are but the result of the accumulation of our progressive inventions
that have endured criticism and the clash with alternative truths. In
this context James is referring to the genesis and survival of our very
categories of thought and conceptual systems as we know them; which,
far from being impressed on our minds from the outside – either brute
or divine – are rather the expression of our selective and tentative
ways of world-making, solidified around a nucleus of truths, resisting
the test of experiencing. This pragmatist picture is at odds with the
intellectualistic one of truth understood as “the simple duplication by
the mind of a ready-made and given reality,” in which there is simply
no space for any personal experimentation and contribution and in
which experiencing is depicted as a matter of mirroring rather than
conducting.
In the sixth chapter of P, on “Pragmatism’s Conception of Truth,”
James explores in more depth the pragmatic picture of truth as inventive,
purposeful conduction, from which various and most interesting ethical
considerations can be drawn. In this chapter, specifically dedicated to
the presentation of the pragmatist conception of truth only sketched in

the second lecture, James shows the difference between the intellectu-
alism of rationalism and the anti-intellectualism of pragmatism. Once
more, rather than presenting it as a contrast between theories, James
presents the conflicting perspectives as two ways of looking at truth: that
is, as two orientations toward its meaning and use. James claims at first
how pragmatism, far from willing to get rid of it, is best equipped to
satisfactory account for the notion of “agreement with reality” at the
heart of any commonsensical understanding of truth. For James prag-
matism is in fact better positioned to account for its details and does not
stop short of them as rationalism does:
The great assumption of the intellectualists is that truth means

essentially an inert static relation. When you’ve got your true idea
of anything, there’s an end of the matter. You’re in possession; you
know; you have fulfilled your thinking destiny. You are where you
ought to be mentally; you have obeyed your categorical impera-
tive; and nothing more need follow on that climax of your rational
destiny. Epistemologically you are in stable equilibrium. Pragmatism,
on the other hand, asks its usual question. “Grant an idea or belief
to be true,” it says, “what concrete difference will its being true make
in anyone’s actual life? How will the truth be realized? What experi-
ences will be different from those which would obtain if the belief
were false? What, in short, is the truth’s cash-value in experiential
terms?” (P: 96–7)
The possession of true thoughts means everywhere the possession of
invaluable instruments of action; and that our duty to gain truth, so
far from being a blank command from out of the blue, or a ‘stunt’
self-imposed by our intellect, can account for itself by excellent prac-
tical reasons. (P: 98)
While for the rationalist truth stands for a static relationship of copying
reality of which not much can be said, pragmatism understands it as
a matter of productive dealing. James connects in the best pragmatist
fashion the possession of some truth with the possibility of fruitful
conduct, and describes both as activities in which is actively involved the
exercise and expression of our subjectivity. The contrast I am interested
in stressing is between a live as opposed to a dead stance we can take
toward experience and thus toward truth. James portrays this contrast
by saying that the reasons for the establishment and recognition of a
certain truth are always practical reasons. Our agency is expressive of
the truths we help establishing, since we consider such truths as the very
background of our practices. James writes:
True ideas would never have been singled out as such, would never
have acquired a class-name, least of all a name suggesting value,
unless they had been useful from the outset this way. (P: 98)
According to this picture, the attainment of truth is not only “instru-

mentally useful” for action, but rather indicates those conduct honoring
the experiences that we consider significant to keep alive and experi-
ment with. James states in this regard that:
From this simple cue pragmatism gets her general notion of truth as
something essentially bound up with the way in which one moment
in our experience may lead us towards other moments which it will
be worth while to have been led to ... When a moment in our experi-
ence, of any kind whatever, inspires us with a thought that is true,
that means that sooner or later we dip by that thought’s guidance
into the particulars of experience again and make advantageous
connexion with them. (P: 98–9)
The truth is the opposite of whatever is instable, of whatever is practi-
cally disappointing, of whatever is useless, of whatever is lying and
unreliable, of whatever is inconsistent and contradictory, of whatever
is artificial and eccentric, of whatever is unreal in the sense of being
of no practical account. (MT: 48)
According to the pragmatic conception, we have truths because we

are driven to those regions of experience which we find worthwhile
having, so that truths are expressive of our points of view on things:
there would, in fact, be no point in calling a certain idea true if we were
insensible and unconcerned for its grounding. To this extent truths are
the result of the peculiar posture that we can take on reality, and their
establishment is set by an act of endorsement that in its turn is shaped
according to our practical interests and needs. Truth is an “expedient”
for thought and conduct, and any attempt on the part of a rationalistic
thinker to strip our practical interests from the “the life of truth itself”
is bound to the fallacious assumption of seeking an abstraction and
complaining of not being able to find it anywhere at work. Wouldn’t it
be much healthier, both intellectually and practically, to depict truth in
its multiple manifestations?20
In the chapter on “Pragmatism and Humanism” James presents the

pragmatic conception of truth, stressing its grounding in our actual prac-
tices as against the intellectualist approach treating truth as a “typical
idol of the tribe,” a “fixed enigma” or “ideal petrified sphinx.” James
historicizes truth and yet does not find any scandal in so doing, showing
how in fact most of our current practices work under the same conten-
tion. The contrast here is again between paying attention to the ways in
which we actually conduct our lives and the way in which intellectual-
istic requirements are projected on them. James writes:
The slightest exercise of reflexion makes us see that ... the distinc-
tions between the lawful and the unlawful in conduct, or between
the correct and incorrect speech, have grown up incidentally among
the interactions of men’s experiences in detail; and in no other way
do distinctions between the true and the false in belief ever grow
up. Truth grafts itself on previous truth, modifying it in the process,
just as idiom grafts itself on previous idiom, and law on previous
law ... Our rights, wrongs, prohibitions, penalties, words, forms,
idioms, beliefs, are so many new creations that add themselves as
fast as history proceeds. Far from being antecedent principles that
animate the process, law, language, truth are but abstract names for
its result. (P: 116)
According to James the recognition of the radically perspectival and

empirical character of the practices of truth and conduct does not jeop-
ardize, but rather emphasizes, their normative character, grounding it in
the very process of experience described as an inventive, generative, and
self-regulative practice. It is rather the intellectualist attitude that tends
to overlook and disregard the multiple and boosting dealings between
our subjectivity and reality as they actually take place, marking in this
way an often unbridgeable distance between our practices of truth and
their roots in the reality of experience. As for James the very idea of
a “reality independent of human thinking” is nowhere to be found,
on pains of disregarding the too-evident activity of shaping the world
underlying our dealings with reality, the relevant question becomes
how can we fruitfully build on our experience. A round of example of
actual successful practices shows how, rather than crying out for a rather
dangerous notion of normativity lying outside our experiencing and
ruling it disrespectfully of the ways in which we arrive at formulating
such truths, a sound approach would interrogate the ways in which
our experiencing can be more or less fruitful and the truths we live by
expressive of our real concerns. As James writes:
You see how naturally one comes to the humanistic principle: you
can’t weed out the human contribution ... We build the flux inevi-
tably. The great question is: does it, with our addition, rise or fall in
value? Are the additions worthy or unworthy? (P: 122)
Rather than keep striving for a notion of reality as independent from

our human ways of experiencing it, James encourages us to figure out
ways in which such transactions can be most fruitful and worthwhile
having. James presents pragmatism as a resolute form of pluralism in
which truth grows inside experience, and in which the criteria of truth,
as well as those of goodness and rightfulness stem from our ways of ways
of conducting ourselves.
James is here sketching a whole world-view associated with endorsing
a pragmatist conception of truth and its working: according to this
picture normativity is itself the expression of what we care about and
find interesting to single out, protect, and eventually celebrate. There
would be no criterion external to our practices and unrelated to the
expression of our subjectivity and its commitment in conduct:
The important of the differences between pragmatism and ration-

alism is now in sight throughout its whole extent. The essential
contrast is that for rationalism reality is ready-made and complete from
all eternity, while for pragmatism it is still in the making, and awaits part
of its complexity from the future. On the one side the universe is abso-
lutely secure, on the other it is still pursuing its adventures. (P: 123)
For pluralistic pragmatism, truth grows up inside of all the finite
experiences. They lean on each-other, but the whole of them, if such
a whole be there, leans on nothing. All ‘homes’ are in finite experi-
ences; finite experiences as such is homeless. Nothing outside of the
flux secures the issue of it. It can hope salvation only from its own
intrinsic promises and potencies. (P: 125)
James is well aware that this picture can be scary and deemed lacking
any secure foundation which would prevent “opportunism” and “private
judgment” from prevailing; for James, this is exactly what is under our
eyes all the time, and rather than desperately keep trying to hide this
human condition in which we practically find ourselves in under the
carpet we should be brave enough to accept it and wise enough to figure

out ways of living decently in the face of a lack of certainty.
The intellectualist picture, according to James, is not only mythical
but also logically shaky, since no matter how pure we depict the stand-
ards of truth to be, still in order for them to be of any use for us, says
James, the intellectualistic has to grant that we should be receptive to
them, and hence discretional. James’s Kantian point is worth quoting
in its entirety:
These critics appear to suppose that, if left to itself, the rudderless raft
of our experience must be ready to drift anywhere or nowhere. Even
tho there were compasses on board, they seem to say, there would be
no pole for them to point to. There must be absolute sailing-direc-
tions, they insist, decreed from outside, and an independent chart of
the voyage added to the ‘mere’ voyage itself, if we are ever to make
a port. But is it not obvious that even tho there be such standards of
truth that we ought to follow, the only guarantee that we shall in fact
follow them must lie in our human equipment. The ‘ought’ would be
a brutum fulmen unless there were a felt grain inside of our experience
that conspired. As a matter of fact the devoutest believers in absolute
standards must admit that men fail to obey them. Waywardness is
here, in spite o the eternal prohibitions, and the existence of any
amount of reality ante rem is no warrant against unlimited error in
rebus being incurred. The only real guarantee we have against licen-
tious thinking is the circumpressure of experience itself, which gets
us sick of concrete errors, whether there be a trans-empirical reality
or not. (MT: 47)
The pragmatist promise of meliorism lies in a willingness to accept the

ungrounded grounds of our practices, whose normativity is more a
piece of achievement rather than a discovery: an inventive negotiation
between the past and the future, and between the various individuals
involved. James drops altogether any postulate Reality with the capital
letter as a piece of “perverse abstract-worship,” and encourages us to see
norms for what they are: not as pieces of anchorage to an independent,
firmer rocky bottom, but rather as nets we throw at experiencing in the
hope of ameliorating it through strokes of conduct.
Statements such as the latter echo what James would voice even more
dramatically in a small piece collected in MT titled “The Absolute and
the Strenuous Life,” where he goes back on the opposition between
pragmatism and intellectualism highlighting the opposite attitude

toward life and experiencing they express:
Pragmatism, or pluralism, which I defend has to fall back on a

certain ultimate hardihood, a certain willingness to live without
assurance or guarantees ... to live on possibilities that are not
certainties. (MT: 124)
The courage to which James is referring to has a pronounced moral

depth, since it is the expression of that strenuous mood to which he
makes reference in the last section of “Moral Philosopher” as well as in
other moral writings among which “The Will to Believe,” “The Energies
of Men” and “Great Men and Their Environment.” The contrast that I
am interested in remarking is once again the one between a lively and
a dead stance that we might assume toward the truths we live by. For
pragmatist truth is the expression of the peculiar inventive stance we
can take on experience, and its fabrication is dictated by the practical
execution of our interests and needs. Truths, when live options at all, are
grounded in the deeds and conducts that we implement in their name,
and our subjectivity is their “champion and pledge:”
Our acts, our turning-places, where we seem to ourselves to make

ourselves and grow, are the parts of the world to which we are closest,
the parts of which our knowledge is the most intimate and complete.
Why should we not take them at their face-value? Why may they not
be the actual turning-places and growing-places which they seem to
be, of the world – why not the workshop of being, where we catch
fact in the making, so that nowhere may be the world grow in any
other kind of way than this? (P: 138)
This is meliorism at its best, contrasted to the intellectualist anxiety

of securing our claims of knowledge and action in something deeper
than the practices in which they circulate. For pragmatism the establish-
ment and affirmation of truth requires on our part an involvement that
has the traits of a commitment that touches the deepest strings of our
subjectivity. By giving voice to our commitment to establish an intimate
and genuine relationship with the world, which is at the same time (and
for this very reason) accurate and attentive toward the variety of its
aspects, the inventive attitude featuring the pragmatist conception of
truth emancipates from the superstitious views wanting our sensibility
expunged from any commerce with reality. According to James, a most
authentic and realistic hold on the world can be attained not when we
renounce any personal perspective on it, but rather when we acknowl-
edge it explicitly, cultivate it, and eventually criticize it. This process
requires for James a transformative exercise, which he is exhorting us to
endorse and sustain by showing how already large portions of our lives
are sympathetic to such a picture.
In “A More Word About Truth” James would call the pragmatist concep-
tion of truth “ambulatory,” and contrast it with the “saltatory” one of
rationalism: the first “describes knowing as it exists concretely, while the
other view only describes its results abstractly taken.” According to prag-
matism knowing “is made by the ambulation through the intervening
experiences” (MT: 80) and not imposed on them and ruling them from
the outside. It is interesting to note how in this context James opposes
the intellectualistic picture of truth by attacking a version of the logic-
psychology divide – one claiming the irrelevancy of how we arrive at
truth for what truth consists in. James is interested in questioning the
divide by showing how complicate (and eventually artificial) is to sepa-
rate the concreteness of our practices of truth from their validity:
A favorite way of opposing the more abstract to the more concrete

account is to accuse those who favor the latter of ‘confounding
psychology with logic’. Our critics say that when we are asked what
truth means, we reply by telling only how it is arrived-at. But since a
meaning is a logical relation, static, independent of time, how can it
possibly be identified, they say, with any concrete man’s experience,
perishing as this does at the instant of its production? This, indeed,
sounds profound, but I challenge the profundity. I defy anyone to
show any difference between logic and psychology here. The logical
relation stands to the psychological relation between idea and object
only as salutatory abstractness to ambulatory concreteness. Both rela-
tions need a psychological vehicle; and the ‘logical’ one is simply the
‘psychological’ one disemboweled of its fullness, and reduced to a
bare abstractional scheme. (MT: 86)
It is noteworthy to remark how, in passages such as this, James is not

ruling out any place for logic, but rather he is questioning any attempt
at sharply dividing meanings and norms from activities and practices.
Pragmatism can be read as an elaborated attempt to erode this divide
and show how we might well work with a notion of meaning and
normativity which is informed by our practices and activities without
being completely reducible to their sheer happening. In the sixth reply
to his critics (“Pragmatism explains not what truth is, but only how it is
arrived at”) James reinforces this point:
For the pragmatist ... all disincarnate truth is static, impotent, and
relatively spectral, full truth being the truth that energizes and does
battle ... Existential truth is incidental to the actual completion of
opinions. Essential truth, the truth of the intellectualist, the truth
with no one thinking it, is like the coat that fits tho no one has ever
tried it on, like the music that no ear has listened to. It is less real, not
more real, than the verified article; and to attribute a superior degree
of glory to it seems little more than a piece of perverse abstraction-
worship. As well might a pencil insist that the outline is the essen-
tial thing in all pictorial representation, and chide the paint-brush
and the camera for omitting it, forgetting that their picture not only
contain the whole outline, but a hundred other things in addition.
Pragmatist truth contains the whole of intellectualist truth and a
hundred other things in addition (MT: 110–11)
Here James stresses the capacity of ambulatory truth, which promises to

accomplish more than saltatory one, but, as he argued at length in the
other passages commented in this section, pragmatist truth does also
accomplish better a series of seminal desiderata that we wish a philosoph-
ical conception to be able to. In particular, a pragmatist conception of
truth reinterprets in congenial ways the two desiderata of normativity
and of expressivity. Once rid of the picture of truth as a relation between
our mind and a non-human – divine, rational or brute – reality, in favor
of one in which it is the outcome of our inventive and engaged commerce
with reality, one shall achieve the possibility to see how those truths are
at the same time the expression of our subjectivity, and disclose a degree
of objectivity to be negotiated in practice. Being our claims of truth the
expression of our point of view on experience, their validity should be
assessed from within experiencing itself, resisting the temptation of postu-
lating any external guarantee for their validity. Against the traditional
admonition of deeming objectivity and subjectivity as irreconcilable
facets of thought and conduct, James envisioned a notion of normativity
grounded in expressivity. I claim how James’s exploration of the vocab-
ulary of invention should be read as the key to this critical project. In
“Humanism and Truth” James writes that according to pragmatism:
Reality is an accumulation of our own intellectual inventions, and

the struggle for ‘truth’ in our progressive dealings with it is always a
struggle to work in new nouns and adjectives while altering as little

as possible the old. (MT: 43)
As in P (and “Moral Philosopher”), here James characterizes truth as an

inventive stance in which we are called to actively participate in expe-
riencing by giving voice to our particular perspective on things. Truth
as a pragmatist sees it expresses our interest in reality, which we can
cultivate in our ordinary and reflective life. It is our interests and vision
that direct our investigations and determine the truth of certain ideas.
There is no outside standard of truth we ought to follow, except that
which we establish ourselves in the course of experiencing. This practice
is an inventive one since through experiencing we re-arrange the world
in different and before unimagined ways according to our interests. We
invent new truths by noticing overlooked similarities between situations
and discriminating differences among the things that were unnoticed
before. Every experience is revelatory of some aspect of reality because
it makes reference to our personal involvement that has the shape of an
inventive practice of truth. The only resistance possible to this process is
an internal one, and is represented by previous truths and those held by
other human beings. The struggle to accommodate such practical situa-
tions in experiencing is exactly the struggle for pragmatic normativity.
James explores this theme in different directions, but here I am inter-
ested in the ethical consequences of this characterization of truth as
invention. This inventive conception of truth is relevant for ethics since,
as I shall argue in the next section, its overlooking or disregard leads to
what James labeled as the “moral blindness” often affecting our ways of
facing the world and the experiencing of others. Some of the difficulties
characterizing our moral life are in fact presented by James as deficien-
cies in the way in which we represent the concept of truth to be working
in context where is at stakes the way other people experience reality
and respond to it. In particular, through the inventive characterization
of truth offered by pragmatism, James is interested in showing how the
kind of attitude that we might assume toward a certain experience or
situation contributes to determine its moral value.
Truth is thus relevant for ethics because it indicates the ways in which
we pay attention to the world (or lack to) and experience it in ways that
are expressive of our subjectivity. This theme, central in some of his
moral writings to which I shall now turn, is articulated through what
might be called as a re-enchantment of the world itself through a work
on the self. James speaks about a work on our perceptions, sentiments,
and imagination through which we might arrive at experiencing the
world as morally connoted and respect (and encourage) different ways

of attuning with it. Pragmatism is a philosophy that “gets rid” of a series
of intellectualistic pretensions, some of which are of the utmost ethical
significance. Against the pretension of depicting our practices of truth
as independent from a personal transformative involvement, James
retrieves and refines an empirico-romantic conception of experiencing
in which what matters are not only the contents of our truth claims, but
rather the kinds of inventive life involved in entertaining them.
The world re-enchanted: an empirico-romantic

conception of experiencing
The pragmatic characterization of truth as invention stands in stark oppo-

sition (and represents a needed antidote) to the blindness with which
we are affected when portraying the establishment of the truths we live
by as independent from any concrete interventions of our subjectivity.
Such human blindness originates in the incapacity to appreciate the very
source of normativity of truth talking, and James depicts it as a state of
mind and disposition of the self by which we are unable to establish a
meaningful contact with the world and with other fellow humans due
to our unengaged and dead attitude. In his talks to students collected
in TT – “The Gospel of Relaxation,” “On a Certain Blindness in Human
Beings” and “What Makes a Life Significant” – James tackles this theme
with keen insight and rhetorical force, so to shape a rather remarkable
ethical critique of some of our most entrenched assumptions about truth
and experiencing. Among other things, in these essays James explores
the dangerousness of overlooking the inventive character of our claims
of truth – that is, both their being expressive of our point of view and
their acknowledgment of such perspectival nature – hence, the centrality
of attention and discrimination in our cognitive and evaluative life.
In these writings we find thus at work many of those considerations
on the formation and care of the self as chief ethical activities that
James explored in PP. In these essays the vocabulary is the one of inven-
tion and imagination as against that of discovery or copying, which in
turns is portrayed as the main hindrance to the self-experimentation
and self-criticism at the heart of our practices of experience and truth.
Furthermore, this writings share with “Moral Philosopher” the anti-foun-
dational theme about the nature of moral reflection, and should thus be
read in the light of the philosophical work that James delineates in that
essay. In them we find developed the critical theme that, according to
James, should characterize moral reflection: that is the hortatory register
that moral philosophers should be using when doing moral philosophy.
Both aspects are presented in these writings from a distinctive

“pedagogical” angle, given the target of the volume in which they
are collected.21 In these essays, consistently with his wider philosoph-
ical views, James does not advance moral theories or principles, but,
through a great and skilled use of experiences taken from private records
as well as from literature, he exhibits us the sources of some difficulties
featuring our moral lives, continuing in the way the project sketched in
both “Moral Philosopher” and PP. In these writings there are two central
features of James’s moral thought: namely, the idea that ethics has to do
with attention – essentially intentional, perspectival and selective – to
aspects of reality; and the idea that such vision involves a certain educa-
tion and transformation of our subjectivity. For James, being sensible
to a moral scruple calls into question both our personal involvement at
the level of an imaginative attunement with the situation at hand, and
an adjustment of our disposition toward those aspects of reality that we
find important to record. This capacity of appreciating moral salience,
depending on a certain disposition from which we see those options as
desirable, requires from our part a transformation of the way of seeing
and experiencing the world we encounter. For James such transforma-
tion consists in (and is triggered by) an imaginative exercise, in which
we imagine the same experience or conduct in the light of different
explicative hypotheses. As for what regards his discussion of the casu-
istic question in “Moral Philosopher,” James exhorts us to envision
inventive conducts that make it possible to conciliate the diverse moral
exigencies and claims exercised by our fellow human beings or by our
previous selves at earlier times.
This characterization of ethics is congenial to the pluralism advocated
and thematized in these essays. James speaks of a moral blindness that
affects us because of our unimaginative attitude toward alien truths
(as well as toward our own ones) and, more generally, toward the way
in which they are entertained. In his essay “On a Certain Blindness in
Human Beings” James explores this possibility, and traces its seeds in
our very nature of practical beings. In the preface to TT, James regrets
about its paltry reception “as a mere piece of sentimentalism,” since he
considered the piece as a most important statement of his views. The
summary he gives to it is very instructive, representing a privileged key
to break into its nuances as so appreciate the force of its dialectics:
I wish I were able to make the second, ‘On a Certain Blindness in

Human Beings,’ more impressive. It is more than the mere piece of
sentimentalism which it may seem to some readers. It connects itself
with a definite view of the world and of our moral relations to the
same. Those who have done me the honor of reading my volume of

philosophic essays [WB] will recognize that I mean the pluralistic or
individualistic philosophy. According to that philosophy, the truth is
too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed
‘the Absolute,’ to know the whole of it. The facts and worths of life
need many cognizers to take them in. There is no point of view abso-
lutely public and universal. Private and uncommunicable percep-
tions always remain over, and the worst of it is that those who look
for them from the outside never know where. (TT: 4)
James thought the essays one of the boldest expressions of the pluralist
and individualistic character of his pragmatism, whose practical conse-
quence “is the well-known democratic respect for the sacredness of
individuality ... the outward tolerance of whatever is not itself intol-
erant.” The gist of the essay is that of negating the availability of an
absolute point of view from which weighting truths and goods, showing
the dangerousness of such eventuality. The reference to the “human
blindness” of the title is explained in terms of the unwelcome habit
of assessing truths and ideals from the outside of their actually being
endorsed, thus missing their point, value, and promise.
The characterization of this defect in terms of blindness is related to
the importance of vision in moral issues, whose lack might jeopardize our
moral judgments and thus the moral life altogether. According to James,
the aim of moral reflection is to show the sources of this “ancestral blind-
ness” and point to possible remedies. If such blindness is rooted in our
human condition, given our practical constitution and some unques-
tioned assumptions about the nature of our experiencing, the moral
philosopher should encourage us to overcome this bias (which takes the
form of dogmatism) by bringing its dynamics to light and suggesting
lines of resistance. What is very important to note is how James thinks
the moral philosopher should be doing it: not by offering some theory
but rather by inviting us to transform and improve our sensibility and
attunement with the world and our fellow human beings inhabiting it.
Seigfried nicely captured this aspect:
The social aspect of James’s ethical perspective cannot be found in

a developed social theory, but rests in his appeals to the concrete
specificity of others as others. We respect others not by imposing our
ideals as to what is good for them but by responding to their “actually
aroused complaints,” that is, by letting them speak for themselves.
(Seigfried 1999: 92)
Since our blindness is partly generated by the overlooking of the perspec-

tival and interested character of our vision of reality, its remedy should
pass necessarily through its acknowledgment and transformation. By
perceiving reality as infused with truth and values, which impose on
us necessary absolutes, we tend to overlook the fact that other human
beings have their own personal relationships with reality. A more faithful
representation of reality would thus call for the acknowledgment of a
plurality of meanings, saliencies, and truths. Such an acknowledgement
implies a radical questioning and transformation of our vision, together
with a full understanding of our own perspectival access to the world by
means of a refinement of our imaginative capacities.
James invites us to appreciate how our judgment concerning the worth
of things depends on those things’s hold on our sensibility, denouncing
the dangerousness of overlooking this and causing incapacity to enter
imaginatively into alien truths and values, visions and ideals. As practical
beings “with limited functions and duties to perform,” James states, we
feel and think that the only important truths and significant ideals are
the ones we intimately feel informing our life, being our “vital secrets”
almost incommunicable to others. This moral blindness consists in a
conative as well as in a cognitive failure, since when we are morally
blind toward others’ needs, values and truths we are not only unable
to make sense of their visions and struggles but also of the realities
these attitudes help to constitute. That is, we are blind toward aspects
of the world itself, those envisioned by the truth claims of other human
beings, thus jeopardizing any sound and sensible notion of normativity.
This has tremendous ethical consequences. James remarks:
Hence the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal
with the significance of alien lives. Hence the falsity of our judg-
ments, so far as they presume to decide in an absolute way on the
value of other persons’ conditions or ideals. (TT: 132)
This failure is presented by James as a failure to occupy an engaged

point of view toward the truths and experiences of others, and toward
our own as well. In fact, when we portray a certain truth or experi-
ence without questioning the meaning that they have for the subject
having it, we miss their very point and significance, as well as their
possibility of being properly assessed. The spectator’s disengaged stance
toward a certain experience condemns her to miss the truth expressed
in that experience, hence to the moral blindness “in which we all are
afflicted in regards to the feelings of creatures and people different from
ourselves.” According to James there is a deep entanglement between

knowing truths and feeling experiences: in order to make an experience
come alive in our mind we have to imagine what it means to endorse
it as true.
James marks once more a contrast between an engaged and a detached
stance towards truth, relating this time the personal involvement neces-
sary for considering something as true to its validity and significance:
The spectator’s judgment is sure to miss the root of the matter, and
to possess no truth. The subject judged knows a part of the world of
reality which the judging spectator fails to see, knows more while the
spectator knows less; and, wherever there is conflict of opinion and
difference of vision, we are bound to believe that the truer side is the
side that feels the more, and not the side that feels the less. (TT: 133)
The blindness James is voicing here is the one we are subjected to when
we assume an insensible and spectator attitude toward alien evaluations
and conducts. We are morally blind when we fail to see how the sources
of truth are nested in the very meaning those experiences have for those
who have them, and are expressed in their deeds and conducts. When
we fail to realize this, our perception of reality itself is poor and our judg-
ment about it restricted. Every time we are unable to account for a certain
aspect of the world valued by someone due to our insufficient attention,
we are both ethically and epistemically defective: for James, the accuracy
toward the significance and truth claimed in the world is an epistemic as
well as an ethical requirement, since our contact with the world should
be expressive of our ways of seeing things, so that a description which
expunges the particular personal contributions of the subjects involved
conveys an inadequate and myopic attitude to the world. James in fact
depicts such blindness as consisting in a series of cognitive and conative
deficiencies:22 that of not being able to enter imaginatively into the mood
in which others see the world; that of systematically failing to appreciate
the efforts and strivings of other individuals and creatures implied in
such claims; and that of not valuing the richness of alien perspectives
informing the sense of possibility and openness of reality from which we
all benefit for the actual exercise of our own subjectivity.23
The essay presents a series of examples taken from literature and personal
records in which is depicted a failing in grasping the nature of truth
claims caused by a unengaged or dead stance toward alien experiences
and meanings. This way of proceeding can be (and had been) seen with
suspicion, as James piles personal experiences, literary fictions and reports
throughout virtually the entire essay, without bothering to comment on

them at proper length. The whole paper consists in this original collage
spaced by but a few remarks. However, given what we learned from James
in the closing of “Moral Philosopher,” this way of proceeding is precisely
what he was advocating in that essay: philosophy, if it wants to really
touch the moral life, should be tentative and suggestive, and ally with
literature and genuine narratives rather than with dispassionate treatises.
Arguments do not work as mere pieces of logical machinery but rather as
tools to make us appreciate something that was hidden to us: something
we did not want to accept, or something that we were seeking but unable
to find. This is why James integrated his prose with ample quotation from
literature and scenes from the ordinary. As Seigfried notices:
Most contemporary philosophy is written for professional philoso-

phers and judged by its logical coherence and technical virtuosity.
James calls such dry exercises escapist and argues that philosophy
should instead finds its home in the messy world of everyday life,
which it should help to understand and transform. Instead of seeking
the classic sanctuary of pure ideas so beloved of philosophy profes-
sors, James expects reflective engagement with “the world of concrete
personal experiences to which the street belongs.” (1999: 92)24
It is not that philosophy as an reflective exercise and activity should get

rid of arguments and abstract reasoning of all sorts, but rather it should
put them at the service of “the world of concrete personal experiences
to which the street belong.” The point, rather than that of prescribing
answers to be put mechanically into practice, should be that of problem-
atizing questions as they are encountered in our everyday transactions.
In these texts James indulged in such philosophical storytelling.
James tells us, for example, about a journey in the mountains of North
Carolina in which something momentous happened to him, which
would correctly depict the kind of personal transformation that he
mentioned as of key ethical relevance. While traveling James noticed
some squalid mountaineer cabins built in the middle of a desolate land-
scape and run by what he sees as dull people. While at a first sight James
saw poverty and desperation, condemning such scene as a brute violence
toward the grace of nature and as an insult to human dignity itself, on a
second and more imaginative look he perceived zeal and excellence since
he glimpsed what that lifestyle signified for those mountaineers strug-
gling to survive in that situation. Their existence, made of a precarious
shelter, a lack of interest for nature, and an apparent disregard for their
own individuality, deeply discomforted him at first. However, to this

perception and response James contrasted another one as a result of a
shift in perspective and of attitude toward such experiences and ideals.
As he writes in a telling, dramatic passage:
I said to the mountaineer who was driving me, “What sort of people
are they who have to make these new clearings?” “All of us,” he
replied. “Why, we ain’t happy here, unless we are getting one of these
coves under cultivation.” I instantly felt that I had been losing the
whole inward significance of the situation. Because to me the clear-
ings spoke of naught but denudation, I thought that to those whose
sturdy arms and obedient axes had made them they could tell no
other story. But, when they looked on the hideous stumps, what they
thought of was personal victory. The chips, the girdled trees, and the
vile split rails spoke of honest sweat, persistent toil and final reward.
The cabin was a warrant of safety for self and wife and babes. In short,
the clearing, which to me was a mere ugly picture on the retina, was
to them a symbol redolent with moral memories and sang a very
pæan of duty, struggle, and success. I had been as blind to the pecu-
liar ideality of their conditions as they certainly would also have been
to the ideality of mine, had they had a peep at my strange indoor
academic ways of life at Cambridge. (TT: 134)
What James describes here is a personal transformation of the way of

seeing and thus appreciating a certain situation, characterizing a passage
from a disengaged to an engaged attitude, from a passive to an imagina-
tive stance. As in the story he tells, a certain situation that from a certain
point of view can be read as vile or even disgraceful, from another one
it will result virtuous and beautiful. James describes what happens when
one suddenly realizes that what is worth having in the world is a func-
tion of its valuing as worth according to a particular perspective, even
if that could be alien and shocking from an external point of view. In
the situation described James’s vision, and consequently his attitude,
changed so that new saliencies and significances suddenly came to sight.
The blindness toward others meanings and truths makes us insensible
in regard to visions and life styles radically different from ours, and thus
jeopardizes the very possibility of assessing such different world-views.
The task of moral reflection, as it is the one of the best literature, is to
make us aware and sensible to such threat:
Wherever a process of life communicates an eagerness to him who

lives it, there the life becomes genuinely significant. Sometimes the
eagerness is more knit up with the motor activities, sometimes with

the perceptions, sometimes with the imagination, sometimes with
reflective thought. But, wherever it is found, there is the zest, the
tingle, the excitement of reality; and there is ‘importance’ in the only
real and positive sense in which importance ever anywhere can be.
(TT: 134–5)
James’s example reminds us how much difficult it is to envision what

others prize, since event a sympathetic grasp of why they hold their
values often eludes us. This is because we must be able not only to
project ourselves in alien situations, but also to grasp imaginatively how
that situation could touches emotively other human beings, and this is
something that we could at best try to guess since our view of the excite-
ments of others is always external and limited to their most external
actions and words. However, James adds, even if we do not have any
privileged epistemic access to their subjectivity, we share with them
something that is more profound: that is, a life of practices and interac-
tions in which we communicate our meanings of things with others,
and in which conduct is not a merely vehicle of thought and feeling but
their very expression.
James helps himself to make this point by referring to a literary piece.
James quotes a long passage of Stevenson’s short novel The Lantern-Bearers
in which the American novelist and essayist describes a nocturnal game
played by some children consisting in hiding some lanterns under their
coats, creating in this way an almost magical sense of membership. As
Stevenson writes, the possession of a lantern was not useful of pleasant
for any particular reason appreciable from a spectator or external point
of view, but it conferred on whoever shared that practice an intense and
profound significance, as the children playing their secret game partook
in a world of saliencies, meaning, and hopes. The contrast that James
is interested in remarking is the one between the lantern-bearers and
the ones not participating in the game: in the former their experience
is colored by an intense and characteristic tone to which the latter are
insensible. The remedy against human blindness lies for James in the
recognition of the primacy and importance of practice: by sharing a
dimension of words, intentions, conducts and thus meanings, we are
able to bridge the distances which lie inevitably between our way of
living them.
However, even at this level there lies the possibility of a different,
and for some aspect more serious, kind of blindness which assails us
from the very inside: that is, losing touch with the meaning of our own
truths and experiences, as presented in James’s discussion of Whitman’s
attack to routine and mechanic lives or Tolstoy’s description of the life

of Russian prisoners in War and Peace, whose conditions make them
blind to the richness of meaning and possibility in life. Incapable of
perceiving reality as meaningful for us, we are consequently unable to
give attention also to others’ requests and meanings – unable to read in
their lives any genuine significance and worth. The blindness of which
those authors speak consists in an impoverishment of experience alto-
gether, which stiffens and becomes impermeable to the truths and values
inhabiting it. James associates once again blindness with the torpidity of
our experience, which might recover its significance only through the
adoption of a lively and engaged attitude toward it. This kind of blind-
ness is compulsive of our perspectival nature, which has the power to
bring us either closer to or more distant from the appreciation of values
and saliencies.
James describes the possibility of overcoming this condition of blind-
ness as a transformation of the self, in which we break the mere externality
toward truths and meanings, gaining in this way a better perspective from
which appreciating such plurality in its fullness. The spectator and passive
attitude is nothing but the expression of that intellectualistic picture
according to which the appreciation of truth does not involve any exercise
of subjectivity. If in fact one purifies experiencing from our any personal
involvement and contribution one would tend to be blind toward alterna-
tive ways of conferring meaningfulness on it. For James a genuine ethical
life can be realized only through great effort and a willingness to withstand
the tension that the overabundance of points of views necessarily brings.
James’s pluralism does not call for a generic and painless harmonization
of the various claims and ideals to be attained through their weakening or
conformation (thus confining them to an impersonal standard severing
the various eccentricities), but rather in their recognition and celebration
in what Riconda (1999: 108) calls an “exercise in radical difference” and
Medina (2010: 139) describes as a “politics of specificity.”
In the conclusion James draws a lesson of method echoing the very
closing of “Moral Philosopher.” He in fact ends the essay with some
considerations that have the shape of invitations to further reflection.
James writes:
And now what is the result of all these considerations and quotations?
It is negative in one sense, but positive in another. It absolutely forbids
us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of
existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect,
and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in
their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off:
neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any
single observer, although each observer gains a partial superiority of
insight from the peculiar position in which he stands. Even prisons
and sick-rooms have their special revelations. It is enough to ask of
each of us that he should be faithful to his own opportunities and
make the most of his own blessings, without presuming to regulate
the rest of the vast field. (TT: 149)
James warns us to beware of unimaginative and narrow understandings

of the way in which our moral life is animated by the notion of truth. He
urges us to pay attention to the varieties and plurality of ways in which
experience might be filled with significance and importance, stressing
the anti-foundational and elucidative character of moral reflection. These
remarks do not constitute an answer to our moral conundrums, far less a
solution for our personal troubles; rather they represent a plan for more
work to be undertaken individually and piecemeal. For James the road
to ethical normativity passes through the acknowledgment of the radical
perspectival character of our attribution of truth and value, which should
be assessed at their face value and not as the reflection of absolutes.
In the essay “What Makes a Life Significant?” James explores in even
more breadth these methodological instructions by opposing the inven-
tive stance of truth to the one of intolerance characterizing moral blind-
ness. This contraposition exhibits the connection between truth and
ethics underlying these moral essays: James claims in fact that an episte-
mological failure amounts to a moral failure, and vice versa. The opening
of the essay insists on this point:
In my previous talk, ‘On a Certain Blindness,’ I tried to make you

feel how soaked and shot-through life is with values and meanings
which we fail to realize because of our external and insensible point
of view. The meanings are there for the others, but they are not there
for us. There lies more than a mere interest of curious speculation in
understanding this. It has the most tremendous practical importance.
I wish that I could convince you of it as I feel it myself. It is the basis
of all our tolerance, social, religious, and political. The forgetting of
it lies at the root of every stupid and sanguinary mistake that rulers
over subject-peoples make. (TT: 150)
Our failing consists, according to James, in the inability to grasp

the significance of a situation that is claimed and endorsed as true by
someone. Our blindness consists in the incapacity to appreciate the way

in which truths are recognized, endorsed, and lived by those entertaining
them. Moral reflection should manifest the grounds of this incapacity,
that is the “pretence to dogmatize” which is “the root of injustices and
cruelties,” so to imagine strategies for its overcoming. James writes in
fact that the acknowledgement of this condition is the first step in the
way of its resistance:
We have unquestionably a great cloud-bank of ancestral blindness

weighing down upon us, only transiently riven here and there by
fitful revelations of the truth. It is vain to hope for this state of things
to alter much. Our inner secrets must remain for the most part impen-
etrable by others, for beings as essentially practical as we are neces-
sarily short of sight. But, if we cannot gain much positive insight into
one another, cannot we at least use our sense of our own blindness
to make us more cautious in going over the dark places? Cannot we
escape some of those hideous ancestral intolerances; and cruelties,
and positive reversals of the truth? (TT: 151)
James relates again the entertainment of certain truths and the moral
blindness to which we are subjected because of our disengaged and
external attitude toward the truth and significance of alien experiences.
If this blindness seems to be a distinctive feature of our practical and
perspectival nature, moral reflection should render it manifest so to
make us more aware of the limits of our judgments and evaluations.
This critical analysis is of the utmost ethical importance, because the
blindness toward alien truths and values that makes us insensible in
regard to different visions and lifestyles might take the shape of a self-al-
ienation: that is, a contraction of our subjectivity in which we renounce
to see our own truths and values as the most genuine expression of our
encounter with the world.
In the essay James presents another round of scenes of instruction
about a variety of different lifestyles taken from personal experiences
and literary works. In each of these situations James describes an occa-
sion in which our blindness prevent us to appreciate a genuine mean-
ingful situation experienced by someone with a radically different take
on reality. This is the case of his experience of the Assembly Grounds in
Chautauqua Lake, with its tidy and ordered society, the sight of Buffalo’s
workmen of the laboring class with their great fields of heroism, or
Tolstoy’s soldiers and peasants with their dignity and spiritual condi-
tion. James suggests how their appreciation depends on the capacity to
read such conduct as expressive of ideals rather unrelated to them. To

understand an ideal means to understand a person’s vision, and make
sense of her truths and experiences. James’s characterization of ideals is
twofold:
An ideal ... must be something intellectually conceived, something of

which we are not unconscious, if we have it; and it must carry with it
that sort of outlook, uplift, and brightness that go with all intellectual
facts. Secondly, there must be novelty in an ideal – novelty at least
for him whom the ideal grasps. Sodden routine is incompatible with
ideality, although what is sodden routine for one person may be ideal
novelty for another. (TT: 163)
These two features represent the two poles around which the dialec-
tics of these essays revolves: ideals are states of mind and dispositions
of the self that must be actively endorsed in order to exist, and their
grasp requires novelty and invention. Ideals express the kind of active
engagement involved in experiencing, and characterize our intellectual
as well as our affective life. The truths embodied in such ideals consist in
attitudes that must be always exercises in order to exit, and their adop-
tion has, according to James, an inventive character. They convey the
kind of stance we might assume on experience, determining in this way
our practical horizons. Ideals are novel in the sense that their establish-
ment consists in a creative act, and the failure to commit to the reality
of ideals denotes a deficiency in one’s moral life. Such a deficiency is
not merely sentimental, but also cognitive, because by being blind
toward the reality of ideals we are blind toward aspects of the world
whose meaningfulness depends on our active engagement. Ruth Anna
Putnam, in stressing the cognitive character of the novelty of ideals and
its relevance for the moral life, writes how:
An ideal may contain novelty in at least two ways. First, an ideal may
be of such a kind that a person living in pursuit of it will inevitably
encounter novelty, although the ideal itself in not novel ... . One’s
ideals may contain novelty in a second sense; one may envisage
changing the world, changing the way the world would go without
one’s intervention. Often this is what James had in mind.25
By actively endorsing some ideals and the truths they convey we help
to shape the values circulating in the world, which would be otherwise
frustrated and lost. The establishment of the truth of a certain moral
ideal requires one to take an engaged stance toward the relevant experi-
ences she undergoes. By endorsing some ideals over others we make a
choice that is of ethical significance, since we choose to invest some
aspect of reality with value, and the role of moral reflection is precisely
that of remarking the inventive character of such an endorsement so to
dissolve the difficulties arising when we unwittingly portray it as a move
that does not involve any personal contribution on our part.
James characterizes this personal striving and commitment in the
realization of one’s ideals as what confers meaning to a certain experi-
ence, and what we should thus appreciate when assessing it:
The solid meaning of life is always the same eternal thing, – the
marriage, namely, of some unhabitual ideal, however special, with
some fidelity, courage, and endurance; with some man’s or woman’s
pains. – And, whatever or wherever life may be, there will always be
the chance for that marriage to take place. (TT: 166)
This recalls the characterization James gives of moral conduct in the

chapters on “Attention” and “Will” of PP. In these texts James stresses
the importance of an engaged attitude and the commitment featuring
our ways of world-making. In this sense James suggest a possibility for
a re-enchantment of the world through a work on the self that has the
shape of the engagement in practices that are expressive of our distinc-
tive point of view on things. This personal involvement that moral
reflection invites us to endure has the shape of a strenuous attitude
toward experience and a willingness to acknowledge alien conducts as
expressive of truths and values that is worth taking into consideration
as well. James is thus interested in describing our practices of truth and
experience as ways of engaging reality in meaningful and enriching
ways. The relationship with experience is for James an active and
dynamic one: pragmatism claims that nothing is fixed or immutable
within the context of actual or possible experiences. Once again what
is stressed is the vocabulary of agency and invention as against that
of passivity and representation. Those depicted in these texts are the
shortcomings that we incur when we endorse a representationalist (as
against an agential) picture of the nature and place of truth in conduct.
The closing of “What Makes a Life Significant?” recalls the one of “On
a Certain Blindness:” the moral indications James offers to his readers
have the shape of exhortations to reconsider one’s moral practices, their
assumptions as well as their shortcomings. The grip of James’s unique
blend of storytelling and philosophical analysis does not consist in
any knock-out argument nor is its point to offer binding prescriptions;

rather, it has the force of an insightful elucidation of the presumptions
and implications of the various attitudes and conducts underlying our
practices. James adds that:
Of course, this is a somewhat vague conclusion. But in a question

of significance, of worth, like this, conclusions can never be precise.
The answer of appreciation, of sentiment, is always a more or less, a
balance struck with sympathy, insight, and good will ... . And in the
course of getting it, it seems to me that our eyes have been opened to
many important things. Some of you are, perhaps, more livingly aware
that you were an hour ago of the depths of worth that lie around you,
hid in alien lives. And when you ask how much sympathy you ought
to bestow, although the amount is, truly enough, a matter of ideal on
your own part, yet in this notion of the combination of ideals with
active virtues you have a rough standard for shaping your decision.
In any case, your imagination is extended. (TT: 165)
As for the other aspects of James’s philosophical perspective, here I am

interested in stressing how James is not positively imposing pluralism
as the right view, but rather inviting us to welcome and explore both
its ordinary and reflective potentialities. I think in fact that the most
distinctive contribution of James in regards to this concept is that of
bringing to light its philosophical stakes and the personal use we can
make of it.
The pluralism James is here hinting at is nothing but the result of the
convergence of the pragmatic temperament and conception of philos-
ophy with an empirico-romantic understanding of experience. If in fact
pragmatism is understood and practiced by James as an anti-aprioristic
and anti-intellectualistic attitude toward reality, which asks us to pay
attention to the variety of practical differences that such experiencing
might have for the individuals engaging in it – whose life is intimately
intertwined with the entertainment of such truths – while radical empir-
icism presents experience as consisting in the ways in which we relate
its various parts, in the light of considerations of interest and finality in
order to attain a certain picture of the world, then the resulting pluralism
would consist in the encouragement to develop and refine one’s subjec-
tivity in the most diverse directions, dropping the pretense of holding
the right and only epistemic, as well as moral, conduct.26
With pluralism James means at least two things: the idea according to
which experience is perspectival and open to various interpretations, and
the principle according to which each of us, by acknowledging this fact,

should respect and encourage each preference, lifestyle and ideal claimed
in conduct by others. Rather than seeking to level all truths and experi-
ences to some absolute or fictional standard (making reference to the way
the world is), James invites us to acknowledge and promote originality
and responsibility (expressing our ways of world-making). The ideal
motto for this philosophical project and ethical perspective is according
to me best expressed in the opening of SPP, where James writes:
The progress of society is due to the fact that individuals vary from
the human average in all sorts of directions, and that the originality
is often so attractive or useful that they are recognized by their tribe
as leaders and become objects of envy or admiration, and setters of
new ideals (SPP: 9)
This quotation, with a Millian flavor and with the most evident moral
implications, well represents the background and goals of James’s plural-
istic attitude. The most interesting outcome of this work on the concept
of experience is the characterization of what we might call its instable
meaning: James is interested in showing how experience can be at the
same time a worldly happening and a personal event in which are depos-
ited our expressive capacities. The dialectic of his writings is permeated
by such tension, that James invites us to keep alive and explore. In the
preface to WB James writes:
To the very last, there are the various “points of view” which the
philosopher must distinguish in discussing the world; and what is
inwardly clear from one point remains a bare externality and datum
to the other ... . Something – “call it fate, chance, freedom, sponta-
neity, the devil, what you will” – is still wrong and other and outside
and unincluded, from your point of view, even though you be the
greatest of philosophers ... . There is no possible point of view from
which the world can appear an absolutely single fact. Real possibili-
ties, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real
crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a real moral life, just
as commonsense conceives these things, may remain in empiricism
as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempt either to
“over come” or to reinterpret in monistic form (WB, viii–ix)
The critiques moved to both empiricism and idealism were partially

motivated by their opposite failure to acknowledge this tension,
stressing either the absolutely shared or the absolute private character

of experience at the expense of the other. James wants to recover an
empirico-romantic and anti-representational conception of experience
in which what is at stake in experiencing is both dealing with the world
and expressing our distinctive point of view on things. By characterizing
experience as our peculiar way of facing the world, in which we give
voice to our ways of response, projections of will and other undertone
articulating the active exercise of our particular sensibility, James wants
to enrich our very understanding of what is at stake in experiencing. By
placing this richness and variety of factors within experience James is
interested to show the personal bending of our genuine claims and prac-
tices of experiencing without renouncing its shared and public dimen-
sion as a worldly happening.
Pluralism is a way of accepting this radical tension without trying to
resolve it by either undermining the personal dimension of our claim
of experience or accepting the basic incommunicability of our world-
views. This is an epistemological as well as an ethical bid, which James,
in a series of other texts to which I shall now pass, explores along
fruitful and innovative lines. The gist of these writings, as I read them,
is the apparent clash between this pluralist perspective and the indi-
vidualism that James at various stages encourages as well as an healthy
and enriching perspective to take on the world and our practices in it.
In the next chapter I shall survey some other moral writings in which
James explores this suggestion by emphasizing the seminal role of this
strenuous attitude in the moral and political life and its transformative
character.
5
Ethical Conduct and Political
Activity
Much has been written about the extent of James’s social and political
commitments. This aspect of his moral thought has in fact been the
most discussed: mainly attacked from the cultural left1 but also cham-
pioned as one particular version of it.2 Since the 1990s this portion of
James’s work has been witnessing a renewed interest,3 and the future
looks even brighter as per a series of fresh, imaginative, and detailed
studies on several aspects of his ethical and political agenda.4 While
such fine studies tackle in depth and from a variety of perspectives this
portion of James’s work, from the point of view of both its involvement
with the American intellectual scene and its legacy, in this chapter I
am interested in showing how the philosophical and moral insights
sketched in the previous chapters are at work in some of his ethical
and political writings. Thus, rather than surveying the vast territory of
James ethical and political ideas, for which I strongly recommend the
mentioned literature, I am interested in showing here how the themes
I have addressed in the previous chapters find original articulation in
what we might call his practical essays. In particular, I shall focus on
the ways in which the hortatory register is at work in such writings,
and how it informs James’s reflections on pluralism, originality, self-
experimentation, moral heroism, and what I shall call the politics of
the self.
There is little doubt that one key concept of James’s moral vision
is that of “rabid” (C9: 625) individualism, which he puts at work in
different contexts and with disparate aims in order to show its indis-
pensability and promise for any sound ethical and political discus-
sion. However, this very notion has attracted a rain of criticism from
all sorts of philosophical corners, because of its alleged neglect of the
wider life of the community, in which individuals blossom or fail to,
214
Ethical Conduct and Political Activity 215
and as a consequence individualism is not one of the central words of

our moral vocabulary anymore, at least in some circles. Also, it is argued,
by focusing on the moral capacities of individuals, James would have
overlooked the most pressing socio-economical injustice in which they
are raised. Yet, as I shall try to show, the way James understood indi-
vidualism and related it with a whole cluster of other concepts that we
instead still consider as central and cherish as the best accomplishments
of a social-democratic way of life – I have here in mind: imaginativeness,
self-criticism, recognition, and empowerment – is still to be fully appre-
ciated, and might sound a promising conceptual option and strategy to
face some of our current ethical and political impasses.5
In a series of five lectures at Wellesley College, on “Characteristics of
an Individualistic Philosophy,” which took place in the spring of 1905,
James sketched the very philosophical-political agenda of his pragma-
tism, trying to convey its cultural promise and practical advantages –
these lectures constitute indeed a rough and yet extremely meaningful
first draft of P. The outline of the final lecture reads, in typical Jamesian
style:
This then is the individualist view ...

It means many good things: e.g.
Genuine novelty
order being won, paid for.
the smaller system the truer
man [is greater than] home [is greater than] state or church.
anti-slavery in all ways
toleration – respect for others
democracy – good systems can always be described in individualistic
terms.
hero-worship and custom.
faith and help
in morals, obligation respondent to demand.
Finally, it avoids the smugness which Swift found a reproach.6
In this eclectic yet vintage annotation by James we find listed those

features informing his distinctive pragmatic individualist view, which
according to him was meant to facilitate the most pressing prac-
tical issue related to both our private and our associated life. Having
presented how some of those features are constitutive of, and issuing
from, James’s reflecion on ethics (“order being won, paid for,” “obliga-
tion respondent to demand”) and his conception of truth as invention
(“genuine novelty,” “toleration – respect for others”), I would now like

to show how other aspects of James’s thought are depicted and deployed
in his ethical-political writings (“anti-slavery in all ways,” “faith and
help,” “hero-worship and custom”). According to James, individuals and
their “molecular moral forces” represent in fact the key of any feasible
ethical and political melioration: rather than mere abstractions from the
environment and social conditions in which they thrive or stagnate,
individual selves are the very sources of any genuine transformation of
the “world we practically live in.” “The smallest system the truer,” and
“democracy” can be well described in individualistic terms as at pains to
deprive us of precious critical and transformative resources to enact in
our social and political lives. As in fact James replied to a similar charge
voiced by Dewey and the social literature of his time, social and political
improvement is always and necessarily subsidiary to personal self-exper-
imentation. Koopman nicely captures this ethical-political option at the
heart of the Jamesian mood by stating that:
James is not defending the purity of the individual from its corrup-
tion by social institutions; he is defending the creative energies that
individuals can inject into institutions. The decisive question is one
of prioritization. Should politics be a matter of institutional crafting?
Or should it be a matter of ethical practice, a way of life? James is
unequivocally in favor of the latter. (Koopman 2005: 180)7
My interpretative claim against the critics who spotted in his work the
lack of any elaborated political and social concern8 is that, for James,
political and social criticism was fully entrenched in the ethical, and
thus we can find such criticism addressed in those moral writings in
which he investigates the forms of practical engagement with oneself
and with the world: there would thus be no blindness in William James
on this issue, but rather a request for an optical adjustment of our philo-
sophical and critical lenses, necessary to transform the way in which
we perceive, address, and possibly resolve those issues in our private
and public lives. Such transformation is thoroughly ethical and requires
us to go back to the moral forces of individuals unleashed when facing
their most pressing practical and ordinary problems. Ethical conduct,
that is a conduct of the self and the self in conduct, lies thus for James
at the heart of any social amelioration and political advancement. It is
personal in character, individual in scope, and melioristic in purpose.
It is important to note how the latter is not only an epistemological
thesis about how to best depict the various ways in which we encounter
and cope with the world, but is first and foremost an ethical one –
ethical in the acceptance we are exploring in this work, that is involving
the formation, care, and perpetual re-negotiation of one’s distinctive yet
fleeing identity in conduct. Taking issue with this well respected and
influential worry, about the adequacy of James’s philosophical approach
to the most pressing practical problems affecting human beings in their
ordinary and intellectual lives, shall thus serve as a privileged stand-
point from which to survey one further aspect of James’s moral thought,
and of his work as a/on the moral philosopher: namely, the discussion,
edification and care of the self in the context of ethical and political
conduct. James sketches a critical reflection on – and a problematiza-
tion of – our practices of experience (that is, of our doing and undoing
of experience), which invites a distinctively ethical and political form of
engagement with oneself and one’s fellow beings. This body of reflec-
tions, far from constituting a theory or pretending to offer an exhaustive
treatment of the complexities of our human practical lives, rather repre-
sents a most helpful and promising open working agenda that we must
handle and put to work in accordance with our own sensibilities and
concerns. That granted, we can confidently state that, despite the long
century dividing us from his words, our cultural and practical situation
has not changed dramatically, and thus we can still greatly profit from
their maturing thoughts.
In order to make this point in the present chapter I shall survey his
thoughts on moral heroism and pluralism, his considerations on mental
and moral energies, and his insights on the issue of a moral equivalent
of war, showing how, far from being at odds with the ideas voiced in
“Moral Philosopher,” PP, TT, and the other moral essays surveyed so far,
these texts nicely blend with the views there stated. By integrating these
texts with the considerations drawn in the previous chapters, I aim at
sketching the outline of James’s most practical part of his moral thought,
in which what is at issue is the survey of our possibilities for ethical and
political conduct and the peculiar transformational register and perfec-
tionist pitch in which James phrases it. Consistently in his overall phil-
osophical conception, far from prescribing the dictates, contents, and
details of one’s ethical-political conduct, James is in fact rather interested
in surveying its presuppositions and stakes (both ordinary and intellec-
tual), and invites us to explore them in the most diverse directions, by
way of experimenting with ourselves. The hortatory register would thus
be fully in play in these texts as well: even though such writings have
been read as advancing substantive views about human beings and (the
limits of) their given, natural endowment, I shall claim that James was
rather interested in unleashing our capacity for self-improvement and

perfectibility through shared practices and collective activities.
The moral discourse of individualism
As seen in the previous chapters, Perry reconstructed James’s moral and

social views in the light of his strenuous commitment and radicaliza-
tion of the importance of individuality in our theoretical and practical
life alike. In particular, Perry went as far as reducing James’s ethics to the
championing of our wilful self in our struggle to control and rationalize
the world: hence, his broadly consequentialist moral theory preaching
the maximization of our interests and desires. We owe to Richard Gale
(1999) the effort to update, and in large part emend, Perry’s reconstruc-
tion by showing, not only how beyond the “promethean pragmatist”
James also disclosed a most intimate “passive mystical self,” but also
how “one world interpretation” of James, in failing to appreciate the
radical character of the “divided self” informing his writings, generates
formidable incomprehension and trivializations of his thought.
According to this recent reconstruction James would have been moved
by opposite concerns and irreconcilable goals in which the individual is
at the center of the philosophical scene and yet at least two very different
kinds of self seem to be in play. Gales’s reconstruction acknowledges
the well-known concern about the capacity of James’s individualism to
accommodate “the cries of the wounded,” offering, however, a solution
to it. In fact, Gale claims, if we dwell with the promethean aspect of
James’s pragmatism alone we would not be in a position to appreciate his
other most intimate metaphysical and social concerns, in which James
addresses precisely the kind of ethical and political issues he has been so
often reproached to overlook. This rupture or duality voiced by Gale does
not settle the issue though, as it is still an open question whether the
two concerns, coming from radically opposed viewpoints and moved by
apparently irreconcilable (at least according to this reading) cravings, can
really work together – let alone converge – so as to account for James’s
alleged blindness. Gale does not seem to be to alarmed by this kind of
challenge, and is happy to go along with the Jamesian reaffirmation
of the chaotic character of experience and our (both promethean and
mystical) always tentative and largely insufficient attempts to make the
whole of it. If there is any tension in our philosophical account of the
way in which we face the world and our fellow human beings inhab-
iting it, then this is because for James life really has such a chaotic and
pluralistic twist that no clear-cut armchair solution could straighten out.
According to Gale’s James, we are torn apart by such duality: there is no

guarantee that James, the mystical socialist, would be able to speak for
the minorities or the oppressed and be heard by the promethean indi-
vidualist focused only on self-improvement and control.
In the wake of this powerful interpretation other scholars engaged
and endured in the attempt to characterize the kind of individualism
that James was so eager to promote. Such works have been conducted
either by ignoring, dismissing or reaffirming the tension nicely captured
by Gale. The challenge becomes one of trying to harmonize the opposite
drives allegedly animating James’s personal and intellectual persona.
In his recent fine study on individualism in the pragmatist tradition,
Albrecht (2012) finds James consistent in his ethical and political
concerns, arguing how it is precisely his views on individuality and
its possibility of improvement and transformation that allow James to
account, not only for one’s personal moral life, but also for the living
conditions of one’s larger community of peers and the possibility of
engaging each other in rewarding and enhancing ways: thus under-
mining Cornel West’s line of criticism, according to which “James was
preoccupied with the state of his and others’ souls, not the social condi-
tions of their lives” (West 1989: 60). Albrecht writes:
James’s individualism describes a self engaged in the collective moral

project of experimentally remaking our world, a self whose ideals
and actions must always be tested for their ability to harmonize,
coexist, and participate with the ideals of the other sentient beings
striving to shape their own meaningful experience ... Ultimately,
these ethical concerns are best addressed by insisting on democratic
procedures in the experimental processes of human experience.
(Albrecht 2012: 181)
James would thus be much more akin to Dewey’s ethics of social democ-
racy than usually acknowledged, as he too professed the virtues of a
participative engagement to the communal life as the gateway to the
cultivation one’s own individuality and openness to others and their
inner and outer conditions. In fact, for James there would be no genuine
personal progress without social advancement and vice versa, no ethical
deed unrelated to social amelioration and political action.
This feature of James’s thought has been appreciated by Uffelman
(2011) as well, who nevertheless still remarks an important difference
between James’s emphasis on individuals and their practices of self-culti-
vation and Dewey’s social tendencies animating his “new individualism.”
Such differences would not, however, impede the appreciation of deep

contiguities: although James’s focus was more markedly on the relation-
ship of the self with itself, as Uffelman convincingly argues, he too was
moved by a concern about the ways in which the self was coping with
its natural and social environment, if only because the latter represents
the very background against which the individual practices of self-culti-
vation could flourish. Uffelman writes:
James and Dewey incorporated an ethic of self-cultivation into their

visions of the good life. More than theory, self-cultivation centers on
the practice of striving toward the unfolding of personal potential in a
manner that seeks to harmonize the individual with the surrounding
natural and social environment ... An emphasis on the relations
between individuals and an attention to the relationship between self
and world are ethical corollaries to the postulated primacy of relation-
ship. For James and Dewey, cultivating the self is consonant with a
concern for shared meaning and social good. (Uffelman 2011: 322)
James was thus mindful of the necessity to take into consideration the
wider social and economical situation structuring and situating one’s
immediate condition precisely so to have a better understanding of it
and possibly improve it from the inside. The key and recurring words
of James’s moral writing addressing the issue of moral individualism are
in fact not surprisingly those of the perfection of the self and the amel-
ioration of one’s inter-subjective environment: the “growing places”
are in fact often to be found “in the transactions” with other selves
as well as with those natural-cultural conditions constituting the very
soil and horizon of a shared life and productive interaction. Social poli-
cies and political strategies are not the result of a sheer summation of
singular thinking and willing heads, but rather the expression of collec-
tive conducts expressing individual sensibilities and concerns as they
are experienced in a life of transactions and transitions. We help to build
a society by giving voice to our sensibility and not by lining up to some
expected standard obtained by projecting ideal conditions or abstract
considerations on the fabric of reality.9
On a similar note, Trygve Throntveit speaks of the “ethical republic”
James envisioned as the working project of a secularized melioristic
society of individuals:
[James’s] ethics was not a fixed program, but an ideal of private and
public interest converging – an ideal derived from experience, yet
suggesting at every moment the terms and consequences of its own

realization ... While an ethical republic was a dependable fact of expe-
rience, the ethical republic of each day depended upon its members
interventions and interactions in it. The purpose of ethics was to help
people reflect upon test, and revise their freely embraced ideals to
accord with the republican reality of moral life, while also helping
them alter that reality to accommodate as many ideals as possible.
(Throntveit 2011: 259–60)
In presenting the particulars of the ethical republic James envisioned in

his writings Throntveit specifies the various virtues that, according to
Throntveit, a citizen of such ethical republic should have, promote, and
constantly re-affirm in and through her collaborative conduct: experi-
mentalism, historical wisdom, and empathy. According to Throntveit
these virtues would embody James’s commitment to an experimental
individualism aimed at one’s moral improvement which is at the same
time mindful of the inter-subjective conditions in which such process
of self-constitution necessarily takes place. James invites us to engage
and commit to those ideals enriching our “personal moral worlds”
that, however, often come from others with their alien conditions and
prospects. That is, one’s personal experimentations cause tensions and
conflicts, and this is precisely what trigger us to explore new or over-
looked portions of reality and aspects of our subjectivity in order to find
solutions to them, as James voiced in both “Moral Philosopher” and in
the moral essays surveyed in the last chapter.
Far from representing a definitive conclusion, this diagnosis is truly
a prospect for more work to be performed; not a prescriptive guide for
action then, but rather an exhortative sketch of the task ahead of us. It
is thus no coincidence that such an ethical-political program was antici-
pated by James in the depiction of our life of the mind as a field of self-
experimentation: we can read many of the insights of what, in the third
chapter, I have called his pragmatic anthropology as the psychological
and philosophical materials and strategies allowing James to accom-
modate a picture of the self as perennially engaged in an activity of
self-fashioning in the midst of shared practices and collective destinies.
“Moral growth,” writes Throntveit, “requires the same mix of pragmatic
inquiry, creative experimentation, and social verification that James
thought all personal and communal development requires, and it is
equally open-ended” (Throntveit 2011: 271).
Andrew Smith argues on similar lines how the richness of his account
of individuality allows James to make space for the importance of
developing dynamic relationships with other fellow beings in which

what is at stake is both the development of one’s subjectivity and the
recognition of alien conditions. James aimed at “reinvigorating individ-
uals’ efforts at personal amelioration and community revitalization”:
To thereby invert the well-worn statement, James clearly reveals that

the political is personal. His is a philosophy that can be effectively
drawn on to motivate political engagement and to see the world as
not inhospitable thereto. Such means of engagement are, of course,
but one way of staving off complacency and lethargy in the face of
personal and social ills, and not necessarily the means that are of
primary import to him ... James retains [pragmatism] as a tool to be
utilized to empower individuals to discover for themselves how to
refashion their lives and communities. (Smith 2004: 141)
Smith voices what I take to be the gist of James’s conception of moral indi-
vidualism and its connection with social and political considerations: for
James it is only by re-enacting and circulating the ethical forces residing
in individuals with their perspectival take on reality that we can awaken
the torpid spirit of the social and political arena. By looking at his texts we
shall appreciate how in fact, wherever James speaks of individuality, he
does it always in the context of – or in reference/contrast to – community
and its conditions and prospects of growth or decline. The bond between
the self and its peers is in fact for James an internal one: one can variously
criticize, challenge, resist, withstand, condemn or even avoid society, but
still the environment and the other fellow humans with which one neces-
sarily shares a world of practices and horizons shall haunt the individual
back with claims, resistance, and yet new challenges.10
Though James addresses this topic from a variety of angles and with
different emphases,11 two texts deserve the epitome of loci classici:
“Great Men and their Environment” – a title unfortunately betraying
the gendered climate of the time, which James could and should have
avoided and overcame – and “The Importance of Individuals.” In these
works James remarkably articulates how personal and collective growth
are interdependent and mutually call each other in a process that aims
at the improvement and refining of both. In the first essay we find the
well-known passage about the intertwinement of originality and commu-
nality that inspired a few generations many and puzzled as many:
Social evolution is a resultant of the interaction of two wholly distinct

factors, – the individual, deriving his peculiar gifts from the play of
physiological and infra-social forces, but bearing all the power of

initiative and origination in his hands; and, second, the social envi-
ronment, with its power of adopting or rejecting both him and his
gifts. Both factors are essential to change. The community stagnates
without the impulse of the individual. The impulse dies away without
the sympathy of the community. (WB: 174)
In the radical picture James is envisioning and championing individuals

should contribute in original ways to the inter-personal settings and
communities they are involved in for their amelioration along social and
political pathways. This would thus be the main concern moving James
in these essays, in which his views on individualism and personal genius
are constructed in opposition to competing – and according to him ethi-
cally (and thus socially and politically) threatening – pictures advanced
by some philosophers (e.g. Spencer and his disciples) and social and
natural scientists (e.g. Grant Allen and John Fiske) of his time. Although
James’s way of making his main point greatly employs the scientific
language and rhetoric of his time (and of the particular debate over
the philosophical-scientific consequences of Darwinian evolutionism
he vividly contributed to), blaming in fact the view he is opposing as
an “utterly vague and unscientific conception, a laps from the modern
scientific determinism into the most ancient oriental fatalism,” still
I contend that in his dialectics there is a full-fledged philosophical
register at play. In these essays – and in his whole work more gener-
ally – James virtuously shaped a distinctive philosophical line, pragma-
tism or humanism, which, however, was very attentive and mindful to
what was happening in other provinces of our intellectual inquiries and
practices (scientific, artistic, and governmental) so to maintain an open
mindset on such provinces of human life and speculation.12
There are various clues supporting this line of interpretation, some
of which I already had the chance to tackle in the course of the book.
In the first instance, as noted in respect to his work in psychology and
in epistemology, James aimed at crossing the boundaries between disci-
plines, thus complicating and challenging the established orders. He
does the same in this context with ethics and biology, social thought
and natural statistics. As already noted in the context of his distinctive
and non-foundational understanding of “theories” (philosophical as
well as scientific ones), in the essay under consideration James under-
stands evolutionism – but the same holds for the opposite option of
determinism that he was resisting – as a “metaphysical creed, a mood
of contemplation, and emotional attitude” rather than a system of
thought imposing on us because of its sheer rationality and evidence.

The various “scientific” options (as well as the various “philosophical”
ones) should, according to James, be assimilated, tested and cashed out
in practice by concrete beings entertaining them. Thus, his claim that
the (philosophical) conception he is championing in the essay finds
more than a confirmation in the latest (scientific) discoveries is nothing
but an invitation to consider it as a practical option questioning of
older and accepted ones. What according to me James is seeking is
neither the justification of a scientific-philosophical theory, but rather
the appraisal of a philosophical conception informed by a scientific
view he praises because of its practical and experiential outcomes and
consequences.
The individualism James is presenting and advocating represents thus
a philosophical picture about how to think and conduct our human
practices and activities. The contrast James is interested in remarking is
one between an unengaged and detached as opposed to an engaged and
committed view of subjectivity, of its potentiality for improvement and
of its relationship with the larger environment in which it necessarily
moves. In my reading the real issue for James is not whether we should
see the possibilities for self-growth as independent from the environ-
ment in which our conducts take place, but rather is that of surveying
the kind of work on the self involved in such growth and the ways in
which we face the environment so to facilitate it. Individuals are the
fundamental unities for ethical change and amelioration since what is
important is the kind of work they do so to improve society and thus their
very place and role in it. For James, in fact, once we give our individual
potentialities of growth for granted because we accept some role or
constriction imposed on us from the outside (the physical or social envi-
ronment he mentions in “Great Men and Their Environment”), then
our highest possibilities as individuals deaden and our very relationship
with our social and political reality become shallow and paltry. James
was interested in highlighting this well-known dynamics, inviting his
readers to resist it as an unwelcome practical possibility.
James was suspicious about organizations (educational, governmental,
and religious alike) and society at large – understood as forces governing
the associate life in utter disregard of the uniqueness and potentialities
of the various individuals involved and animating them. When in fact
we describe individuals as nothing more than a quiescent gear or dull
mechanism of some greater machinery, over which people have neither
power nor influence, we mortify their expressive capacities and hinder
their very capacity to contribute to society throughout their own ability
for invention and self-transformation. In a widely cited but always

remarkable 1899 letter to Sarah Wyman Whitman James claims that:
As for me, my bed is made: I am against bigness and greatness in all

their forms, and with the invisible molecular moral forces that work
from individual to individual, stealing in though the crannies of the
world like so many soft rootlets, or like the capillary oozing of water,
and yet rending the hardest monuments of man’s pride, if you give
them time. The bigger unit you deal with, the hollower, the more
brutal, the more mendacious is the life displayed. So I am against all
big organizations as such, national ones first and foremost; against all
big success and big results; and in favor of the eternal forces of truth
which always work in the individual and immediately unsuccessful
way, under-dogs always, till history comes, after they are long dead,
and puts them on the top. You need take no notice of these ebulli-
tions of spleen, which are probably quite unintelligible to anyone but
myself. (C8: 546)
Rather than sheer “ebullitions of spleen ... quite intelligible to anyone but
myself,” in this timely passage we find voiced several themes lying at the
heart of his ethical-political agenda, animating in particular some of the
moral writings in which James speculates about the nature of individual
selfhood and its conditions of edification and flourishing. James invites
us to nurture and engage those “molecular moral forces that work from
individual to individual,” the “eternal forces of truth which always work
in the individual” which according to him get systematically frustrated
when we deal with big and hollow organizations in which our subjec-
tivity is systematically frustrated and its originality fiercely combated in
the name of quiescence and averageness. James praises the effort and
struggle for constituting ourselves as individual subjects and celebrates
the truths that we convey through our inventive conduct, even if they are
submerged by strokes of repudiation and disregard. What is most impor-
tant in these exercises of resistance and affirmation of one’s individuality
is the heroic and strenuous mood involved: what James praises is in fact
the hope and the possibility that such ruptures with the established order
would open up productive alternatives for both the individuals involved
and the social and political horizons of the wider community in which
they partake. In “The Importance of Individuals” James speaks of:
A zone of insecurity in human affairs in which all the dramatic interest

lies; the rest belongs to the dead machinery of the stage. This is the
formative zone, the part not yet ingrained into the race’s average, not
yet a typical, hereditary, and constant factor of the social community
in which it occurs. (WB: 192)
Genius and remarkable figures are, according to James, those that are
at home with the “zone of insecurity in human affairs” and ready to
simmer and trial themselves in it rather than escaping from it; those for
whom these “formative zones” represent the setting in which they form
their thoughts, articulate their conducts, and shape their subjectivity,
refusing to take for granted what is offered to them by the environment
and the institutions they happen to live in. For James, such generative
moments are of the utmost importance: by shaking us from our certain-
ties they help us to plunge again into experiencing and “create impor-
tance” in our lives and in that of the community we partake to, not to
mention the crucial possibility of opening up novel paths of dialogue
with alien outlooks and politics. We should thus multiply such occa-
sions and situations, rather than running from them in an attempt to
secure ourselves to “the race’s average.” We should thus fiercely combat
the “desiccation” in the private sphere affecting the social one as well as
a spreading weed frustrating our experimental attempts to live a life “in
extremis:” that can be safely said to the everlasting testament of James’s
cultural politics.13
According to James we should always be willing to re-negotiate the
truths we live by in order to keep their meaning alive, our mindset
plastic, and our selfhood mobile. This willingness to live courageously
in the absence of certitudes as assurance as against the discouragement
incidental to fixities and closure is for James the signature mark of the
pragmatic temperament, which he encourages us to explore in conduct
and reaffirm in deeds:
The zone of the individual differences, and of the social ‘twists’ which
by common confession they initiate, is the zone of formative proc-
esses, the dynamic belt of quivering uncertainty, the line where past
and future meet. It is the theatre of all we do not take for granted,
the stage of the living drama of life; and, however, narrow its scope,
it is roomy enough to lodge the whole range of human passions. The
sphere of the race’s average, on the contrary, no matter how large it
may be, is a dead and stagnant thing, an achieved possession, from
which all insecurity has vanished. Like the trunk of a tree, it has been
built up by successive concretions of successive active zones. The
moving present in which we live with its problems and passions, its
individual rivalries, victories, and defeats, will soon pass over to the
majority and leave its small deposit on this static mass, to make room
for fresh actors and a newer play. (WB: 193)
The language here is very similar to that used by James in the texts I
have dealt with in the past chapters – “Moral Philosopher,” PP, P, and
MT – where he explored the theme of the importance of assuming an
engaged stance over our practices of world-making and self-constitu-
tion. There would be, for James, a constant and necessary re-negotiation
between the truths we live by and their aliveness that calls in cause our
disposition to accept them and live up to them. Ethical and political
conducts would thus be envisioned in this dynamic pragmatic perspec-
tive as achievements of the self against established truths and ideals
taken for granted, and expression of that average of the human condi-
tion that we should rather beware and overcome in a constant effort of
imagination and willful critique. Great individuals and exemplars are
the ones committed and eventually able to break the spell under which
our ordinary and reflective practices are constructed and retold, so to
open up new vocabularies, novel fields of experience and experimenta-
tion as against the deadening and demoralizing drift of the average ideal
lingering behind hollow organizations and depersonalizing groups.
Living a high, self-expressive, and engaged life in which our best
chances and promises are given voice and dared in daily strokes of
courage rather than disavowed and renounced as menacing possibili-
ties requires for James engaging and committing to a distinctive way of
living: namely, a life in the transitions:
Life is in the transitions as much as in the terms connected; often,

indeed, it seems to be there more emphatically, as if our spurts and
sallies forward were the real firing-line of the battle, were like the
thin line of flame advancing across the dry autumnal field which the
farmer proceeds to burn. (ERE: 66)
This unmatchable blend of radical empiricism, perspectivism, and experi-

mentalism does represent the backbone of James’s ethical perspective, in
which the perfectionist moment of his individualist philosophy meets
the empirico-romantic conception of human experiencing sketched in
the previous chapter. James squares his ethical conception with his epis-
temological views and psychological creed, stressing how the possibili-
ties of living a life that is expressive of our subjectivity because it is lived
in the questioning mood are to be found in the zones of transition and
insecurity in which we are at once most alive and most in danger of

loosing ourselves and our peers.
In the two essays under consideration James considers and comments
upon a significant representative of such remarkable figures – philosoph-
ical, literary, scientific as well as religious – emphasizing how their lives
represent the incarnation of such an ideal self we should be attaining and
striving for, through which shaking and revolutionizing ourselves and
the society at large as a consequence of it. As James claims in “Great Men
and their Environment,” qua philosophers and ethicists we should not
concentrate on the “causes of production” of genius, but rather be inter-
ested in their “spontaneous variations” in which their higher capacities
are formed and transformed. James is thus not trying to understand and
justify the chaotic mechanisms producing the state of exception inhab-
ited by great human beings, an inquiry whose importance he is very
skeptical of, because it would show at best the very environmental condi-
tions in which individuals operate, but rather is interested in presenting
their possibilities of self-criticism and improvement affecting their own
individuality and their wider community. He writes:
The mutations of societies, then, from generation to generation, are

in the main due directly or indirectly to the acts or the examples of
individuals whose genius was so adapted to the receptivities of the
moment, or whose accidental position of authority was so critical
that they became ferments, initiators of movements, setters of prece-
dent or fashion, centers of corruption, or destroyers of other persons,
whose gifts, had they had free play, would have led society in another
direction. (WB: 170)
James is here using an empiricist language to voice a romantic theme he

inherited from Carlyle and Emerson – playing with labels, this aspect of
his moral thought could be called a “democratized empirical transcen-
dentalism.” By encouraging us to assess the “ambiguous potentialities of
development” of each individual for their productive enactment he in
fact remarks how we should seek for such possibilities in our ordinary
practices and empirical experimentations, rather than in some external
authority. Against those thinkers of his time (and, for that matter, of
ours as well) contending that social changes are due and completely
accountable by making reference to the environmental conditions in
which exceptional individuals were (are) nurtured, of which Spencer
represented the main spokesman, James suggests to put remarkable
individuals, with their unique sense of things, at the very center of the
moral scene by making them the very source and catalyst of any social
and political change.
We can thus sense in James a clear and firm disdain for any reductionist
maneuver, as in reducing individuals either to the wider organizations
(of any kind) in which they (willingly or not) partake or to their purely
biological constitution we necessarily frustrate the wholeness, tentative-
ness, and uniqueness of persons in their everyday agential struggle with
themselves and the world. In cherishing the importance of individuals
and their personal biographies, James is not negating how both their
social, macroscopic matrix and their personal, microscopic constitution
can be relevant for assessing their possibility of self-expression and flour-
ishing, but rather criticizing that such considerations are overriding when
assessing the ethical cipher of one’s individual thoughts, hopes, deeds,
and conducts. Furthermore, in the case of the wider social environment,
James is far from disregarding its capacity to shape us and influence us,
and thus is well aware of the ways in which our individuality is all but
unimpeded by all sorts of external and internal hindrances: in a manner
similar to what he wrote about truths being constricted by other truths,
James is inviting us to acknowledge how individualities are cornered by
other individualities in an unbroken struggle for survival. It is precisely
this fight of wills that generates a healthy ethical-political attitude toward
our own conducts and a generative ethical-political tension within
society. James is far from claiming that collective protests and strikes can
enact any social-political amelioration and be in some cases much more
effective than singular acts of disobedience and resistance; yet his core
philosophical point, as I understand it, is that the very ethical meaning
of such actions should be kept alive by daily individual strokes of energy,
at pain of compromising the good in such activities and policies.
In praising individuals and their quintessential particularity, James
is claiming to champion a more precise and empirical methodology,
one avoiding the fatalism and paralysis featuring a big share of ideal-
istic social discourse and political practice. In the investigation of the
dynamics of any cultural criticism and democratic progress it is in fact
more profitable to focus on the critical mass of particular forces rather
than pointing to the general drifts of great numbers at pains of loosing
the grasp on the importance of individuals as catalysts of ethical experi-
mentation and social-political renovation.
In “The Importance of Individuals” James aims at depicting the nature
and importance of individual differences that we unwittingly take for
granted and seldom honor in order to show their centrality for any
process of flourishing and betterment of our social-political situation.
Quoting “an unlearned carpenter” of his acquaintance James was in fact

interested in showing how “there is little difference between one man
and another; but what littler there is, is very important.” As Susan Haack
nicely comments “James had a remarkably shrewd and sympathetic
understanding of what makes human beings thick” (Haack 2010: 5);
similarly, Riconda writes that “while in James there is no theory of the
person, we can appreciate in his work a profound sense of its density”
(1999: 105). Once those attempts to ground our subjectivity have been
dismissed in some fixed fact of our metaphysical nature, James depicts
human beings as perpetually engaged in giving a form to themselves
through their deeds and conducts. This practical self manifests where
it is least expected to: our tendencies to take its contours for granted is,
according to James, what systematically prevents us from appreciating
its practices of personal experimentation and socio-political ameliora-
tion. In ethical questions, where what is at stake is evaluating a certain
situation and taking a decision in which we cannot apparently accom-
modate all the preferences and demands involved, we should envision
new or neglected possibilities rather than rehearsing past compromises.
By merely concentrating on averages or accepted standards we would
never be able to address our most pressing practical issue featuring our
social and political life, where what is called for are precisely novel and
more satisfying analyses and solutions of practical struggles in condi-
tions of moral, psychological, and epistemological uncertainty.14 What
James is calling forth is thus a form of moral heroism, which represents
the normative and energetic horizon of the melioristic conception of
the ethical life he sketched in different directions in his writings, early
and late. Geniuses and great individuals are in fact, for James, Carlyle’s
heroes and Emerson’s exemplars: namely, those willing to undergo a
work on the self whose goal is the refutation of received truths and
ideals and re-evaluation of their own values through experiencing. Such
individuals envision and commit to the better self that lies beneath the
average one, the innovator behind the sheer follower. This is the key for
James to enact social change and political activity in a key that is utterly
ethical in its calling in cause one’s possibilities of self-fashioning and
self-transformations as the spurs for socio-political amelioration.
Energy, heroism, and originality as moral virtues
As we have started to see in these ethical-political writings James focuses

on the most practical dynamics and outcomes of the unleashing of our
moral energies in conduct in the most diverse directions. Heroism and
individualism are depicted as chief ethical practices in which we have

a chance to express our subjectivity in always-novel directions, thus
resisting the widespread de-moralization caused by conformism and
conservatism. In these texts what is at stake is a conceptual reconsidera-
tion of our reflective experiencing as an activity of moral significance in
which we shape and take care of our selfhood in an unbroken re-nego-
tiation of our biographies and of their boundaries. In “The Energies of
Men” James notes, for example, how:
Most of us feel as if we lived habitually with a sort of cloud weighing

on us, below our highest notch of clearness in discernment, sure-
ness in reasoning, or firmness in deciding. Compared with what we
ought to be, we are only half awake. Our fires are damped, our drafts
are checked. We are making use of only a small part of our possible
mental and physical resources. (ERE: 131)
James sensibly argues that such condition is at least partially due to

the inhibition of excitements, ideals and efforts, which are precisely
what, according to James, “carry us over the dam” of our ordinary exist-
ence. The distress caused by such a condition originates in suffocating
conventions and habits, which grow too stiff around our subjectivity,
alienating and disciplining us to lead “lives of quiet desperation” as
Emerson phrased it. As against this picture, James praises novelty and
improvisation as morally refreshing attitudes, praising heroic figures for
their capacity to break the spell of custom, thus opening up new fields of
possibility and meaning. It is in fact those exceptional individuals who,
by forcing the barriers grew around their subjectivity with “physical
work, intellectual work, moral work, or spiritual work” serve as exem-
plars to imitate and as provocations challenging our deepest personal
convictions. It is exceptional individuals who, by forcing the barriers
grew around their subjectivity with strokes of daily work serve as exem-
plars to imitate and as provocations challenging our deepest personal
convictions:
We are all to some degree oppressed, unfree. We don’t come to our

own. It is there, but we don’t get at it. The threshold must be made
to shift ... The normal opener of deeper and deeper levels of energy
is the will. The difficulty is to use it; to make the effort which the
word volition implies ... It is notorious that a single successful effort
of moral volition, such as saying ‘no’ to some habitual temptation, or
performing some courageous act, will launch a man on a higher level
of energy for days and weeks, will give him a new range of power.
(ERM: 136)
James fills the texts with a great selection of personal and literary exam-
ples to make his point, from Loyola’s spiritual exercises to battlefield
accounts, from Yoga exercises to Tolstoy’s conversions. The experience
he had when he visited the Assembly Ground in Chautauqua, of which
he tells us in “What Makes a Life Significant,” and the phenomenology
of the diverse temperaments of the youth of America, recounted in “The
Gospel of Relaxation,” can be listed among such materials.15 It is note-
worthy that, in all these illustrations, James is interested in stressing
their blending of casual and intentional considerations and happenings:
sometimes we happen to find ourselves in situations that call for distinc-
tive and unexpected reactions while in others such work on the self
seems to be planned and calculated. In both occasions, however, what
really matter for James is our essential willingness to engage in such
transformative process, whether expected or not. Loren Goldman writes
in this regard that:
James’s concern in his ethical writings lies not in specifying the paths
by which we may attain virtue, but in exhorting readers to overcome
their insensitivity to the myriad ways in which other individuals
derive value in their lives and to accept the strenuous mood of moral
action. In these writings, we see the full sweep of James’s pluralism
as well as his individualist presumption that social progress occurs
mysteriously thanks to the heroism of great men. James is thoroughly
agnostic when it comes to the content of one’s moral ideals so long as
their pursuit does not infringe upon other individuals’ ability to do
the same ... For fear of paternalism, James refuses to posit any poten-
tial institutional or systematic levers for change in the world, and
thus his pluralism leads him away from programmatic political plans
and towards an anarchistic individualism in which heroism is the
primary virtue of public life and the motor of progress. (Goldman
2012: 49–51)16
The fear of paternalism and the willingness to have individuals respon-

sible for their own deeds and actions made James look like a sort of
anarchist apostle, drawing him away from programmatic political plans
pronouncing on the place and duties of individuals in society. This is a
consequence of what Alexander Livingston calls James’s “challenge of
how to make sense of out of political convictions on post-foundational
grounds:” that is, James asked, in Livingston’s words, “what if conviction

was less like a command that pushes us towards some course of action and
more like faith that draws us out of ourselves?” (Livingston 2013: 2).
This theme lies at the heart of a number of pragmatist thinkers who
took seriously the challenge of envisioning paths of ethical activity and
social-political agitation as flowing from the individual’s willingness to
commit to future realities, to be enacted by means of heroic deeds. West,
who in his own work envisioned a similar path along which articulating
his “prophetic pragmatism,” nicely captures this feature of James’s
thought by commenting that:
Jamesian rhetoric of moral heroism intends to energize people to

become exceptional doers under adverse circumstances, to galvanize
zestful fighters against excruciating odds. (West 1989: 59)
It should be noted how, for James, those of heroism and individualism

are ethical practices constantly informing our most ordinary activities as
long as we are concerned with the genuine character of our selfhood and
challenge those identities supplied by circulating models we too often
unwittingly accept. The charges of elitism often raised against perfec-
tionist approaches – beside James, and limiting to the short time-span of
one century, one might think of figures as different as John Stuart Mill,
T. H. Green, Emerson, Nietzsche, and Wittgenstein – should thus be at
least substantially reconsidered (if not dropped altogether), as those very
resources and materials for ethical transformation are constantly under
our eyes and thus up for us to grab. If there surely are wider psycho-
logical, social, environmental, and cultural obstacles to such experimen-
tations, they constitute the very background against which enacting
such efforts is self-transformation: the former might well frustrate the
factual outcomes of such practices of freedom, but in no way can they
undermine their strategic value. Furthermore, at least for some versions
of perfectionism such transformative exercises can only be enacted in
conversation with others, and contribute to the overall wellbeing of
one’s community – if only in making it more aware of its own implicit
assumptions, concealed expectations, and hidden regulations.17
James thus launches a philosophical quest for amelioration based on a
historical-anthropological inquiry into the powers of individuals – thus,
once more against any form of essentialism:
We ought to somehow to get a topographic survey made of the limits

of human power in every conceivable direction, something like an
ophthalmologist’s chart of the limits of the human field of vision;

and we ought then to construct a methodical inventory of the paths
of access, or keys, differing with the diverse types of individual, to
the different kinds of powers. This would be an absolutely concrete
study, to be carried on by using historical and biographical material
mainly. This limits of power must be limits that have been realized
in actual persons, and the various ways of unlocking the reserves of
power must have been exemplified in individuals lives. (ERM: 145)
Note once again the historicist and empiricist vein of this reflective and
critical project:, according to James, no foundational theorization over
such issues is considered necessary nor welcomed, as what he is seeking
is a philosophy able to depict the great variety of human possibilities
in which such practices of self-transformation might take place rather
than pronounce on their extra-empirical validity and extra-practical
grounds.
The melioristic perspective advanced by James, according to which
the progress and improvement of the social and political reality is up
to our moral impulse, is largely described in energetic terms: that is, it
refers to our capacity to take care of and improve the self by controlling
and possibly enhancing its energy and powers. This aspect of James’s
thought has recently been at the center of a renewed interest for the
characterization of the melioristic perspective envisioned in his writ-
ings. The most original interpretation has been advanced by Franzese,
who reads in James a full-fledged “ethics of energy” vindicating a
tension between the striving for self-constitution and its external condi-
tions of possibility, opening the way to sketch ethics in a pragmatic
mood. Franzese contrasts such characterization of James’s ethics with
the substantive one often offered by his commentators (and currently in
vogue in contemporary moral philosophy), according to which the self
is portrayed as a static given which passively learns from a moral theory
how to think and behave. Franzese claims conversely that our nature as
mobile, indeterminate beings sets the goals and strategies of ethics: our
nature of energetic indeterminate beings fixes the horizons and aims
of moral reflection, and at the same time it suggests the strategies and
modalities of its development:
In such a perspective, ethics appears as the problem of consistency in

the organization of the self, that is, of one’s own power and action,
and in the deployment of the experiential field ... The ethics of energy,
then, appears, strictly intertwined with James’s moral perspective.
Energy is not, and cannot be, the foundation of value, but rather is
the normative condition of the praxis that realizes human values. In
other words, the ethics of energy is the ethical structure of the human
historical and cultural movement that aims at the construction of the
human world. (Franzese 2008: 6–7)
The author notes how, according to James, energy should not be read as
a metaphysical principle bur rather as a reflective expedient to unifying
different psychological, nervous, emotive, and spiritual phenomena.
Franzese’s James is a philosopher divided between Kant and Darwin:
on the one hand, he depicts moral reflection as a mediator in human’s
struggle between nature and culture, while, on the other hand, he aims
at refining the evolutionistic intuition – according to which ethics deals
with individual variations rather than with metaphysical fixities – in a
pluralistic direction in the envision diverse possibilities of spontaneous
variation gain legitimacy and value from their ability to express our
subjectivity without reducing it to mere mechanisms of natural selec-
tion. The upshot of this characterization is a pragmatic anthropology,
in which the notion of representation is substituted with that of action,
and correspondence with spontaneity.
The reconstruction of the pragmatic character of James’s philosoph-
ical psychology offered by Franzese pictures ethics as the expression of
a human nature described from the point of view of the organization of
energy that distinguishes us as practical being and that constitute our
character of moral agents. From this perspective, says the author, James
is able to keep open the tension that each individual should feel and
stand between the actual self and its future possibilities. By picturing
individuals as energetic beings James shifts the whole landscape of our
moral investigations, which should abandon the void and potentially
threatening search for an ultimate good, or the establishment of some
order, and concentrate on the kinds of relationships which the self can
entertain with itself:
Moral effort for James is not characterized through the achievement

of some special value, or set of values, but rather through the infinite
striving of human beings engaged in a permanent struggle against
evil, however that is defined in the individual instance ... James
took the term “evil” to have the factual meaning it had in the social
debate of his time, when disease, poverty, slavery, exploitation were
routinely described as evils in newspapers and decried as such by
social reformers. What links these evils together is that they enforce
limits on the full and free expansion of human life and action.
(Franzese 2008: 7)18
This instruction is of the utmost importance because it connects the

several strands of James’s ethics surveyed in this work. Also, it introduces
the theme of originality and the struggle against the social plagues of
James’s time as the virtues that should inform a progressive and melior-
istic individualism. As Franzese claims, there is in fact an heroic element
in James’s individualism as the moral life is depicted as the rupture of
comfortable but deadening certitudes and assumptions with the goal in
mind of envisioning new moral setting. In a way reminiscent of what
James states in “Moral Philosopher,” the highest ethical conduct is the
one in which we infringe established rules that have grown too stiff
around our subjectivity, envisioning in this way new possibilities whose
outcome is itself a challenge to the individual. This is the theme of the
two controversial essays on “The Energies of Men” and “The Powers
of Men,” in which James tackles the very psychological and epistemo-
logical tenets of this ethical characterization of energy. In these writings
James exhorts us to explore and exalt our individualities by “foster rival
excitements and invent new outlets for heroic energy.”
In his introduction to the volume in which the two essays are collected,
John McDermott claims that James is calling forth a program for the
revitalization and revolution of the self through the energization of its
efforts and problematization of its habits:
James’s final message in the two essays is that we should not allow
social conventions to prevent us from being true to ourselves ... James
believes that in the long run we are capable of far more creative
activity than we now reveal; this would be evident if we but had the
will to energize ourselves independently of what others have come
to expect of us, since then expectations are sure to fall short of our
potentialities. (McDermott 1982: xxiv)
According to James, thus, the genuine and highest (in the sense explored
in “Moral Philosopher”) ethical life is the one springing from a discipline
of the self in which we dare full course to our “highest possibilities,” as
against the ineffable forces of custom and normalization which instead,
under the promise of safer docks, numb our subjectivity and thus our
capacity for a moral conduct expressive of our genuine point of view
on things. This and this only is for James the receipt for resisting the
practical adverse conditions we face: in our ordinary experience, social
and political transformation should necessarily proceed from ethical

one understood as a call for an open exercise of perpetual transforma-
tion of our individuality. Emerson’s influence on this way of framing the
issue of individualism and perfectibility is unmistakable. In his oration
in occasion of Emerson’s centenary James remarked that:
The same indefeasible right to be exactly what one is, provided one
only be authentic, spreads itself, in Emerson’s way of thinking, from
persons to things and to times and places. No date, no position is
insignificant, if the life that fills it out be only genuine. (ERM: 113)
Less evident, but plain to the trained sight, is the one of Mills, who
James praised and greatly admired.19 The unique blend of romanti-
cism and empiricism flowing in James’s philosophical veins took
from Emerson the strenuous defense of individuality and from Mill
the perfectionist conception of freedom, re-elaborating both in novel
ways and extending them in congenial directions. As we saw in the
previous chapter within the epistemological context, James’s pragma-
tist temperament opens the way to think of our subjectivity as a field of
self-fashioning to be engaged in our ordinary and reflective practices of
world-making rather than an anthropological given to be dealt with in
some foundational fashion.
James’s speculations on the energies and powers of individuals can
be framed in the wider context of America’s search of new forms of
individualism after the collective crisis of identity, the loss of fixed
individualities, and the vanishing of the subject as a singular entity –
although the phenomenon was widespread at the time and interested
large portions of Western and Eastern civilization alike. Francesca
Bordogna claims for example that James saw this as an opportunity to
rethink the subject and its potentials in ways that were congenial to
meet such cultural and social changes. Rather than building a theory
of such anthropological shift in perspective, James envisioned a prom-
ising path toward rethinking and challenging individuality for social-
political amelioration:
James perceived that the breakdown of the autonomous, well-

bounded self opened up new possibilities both for the individual and
for society ... James’s account of the self negotiated the relationship
between the individual and society in a way that reconciled indi-
vidual autonomy and agency with the full socialization of the indi-
vidual demanded by the new social order. (Bordogna 2008: 191–2)
James thus envisioned a series of techniques of the self that James

surveyed, explored himself, and promoted in the hope to enact an effec-
tive social-political change grounded in individual practices of ethical
self-transformation. James drew material from nearly every corner of
human activities he was acquainted with, both in the first person and
through reading – in a time thirsty for spiritual and economical renova-
tion in which we witness the multiplication of such practices and their
discussion – in order to shake the torpid routined spirit and challenge the
several dangerous drifts of a life of conformism and compliance for the
self. These themes resonate with what James vigorously addressed in his
psychological work as the main goal of a flourishing mental and moral
life: namely, the nurture and development of originality as a key aspect
of an individuality capable, not only of facing and tolerating diversity,
but also of positively seeking it as a practically healthy attitude. In order
to be able to profitably facing otherness we should train ourselves to be
stranger to ourselves. The more we try to live differently the better we’ll
cope with difference. The strenuous mood involved in the cultivation of
one’s originality nicely blends with the opportunity to be vigilant about
the contours of one’s subjectivity and their possibility to be renegotiated
in practice in the light of pressing social-political problems.
These essays are suffused with the hortatory register as, far from
drawing some prescriptive arguments for the accomplishment of such
ethical transformation, James is interested in urging us to engage in this
individual and personal exercise of self-criticism of, and self-experimen-
tation with, one’s energies and powers. What James depicts is at the
same time a program for functional psychology and a call for moral
cultivation: the strive for originality is presented in medical as well as in
philosophical terms – and not very surprisingly so, given the therapeutic
and transformational characters of the hortatory register in which such
considerations are lodged. As James remarks in “The Energies of Men”
the terms in which he tackled this issue “have to remain vague; for
though every man or woman born knows what is meant by such phrases
as having a good vital tone, a high tide of spirits, an elastic temper,
as living energetically, working easily, deciding firmly, and the like, we
should all be put to our trumps if asked to explain in terms of scien-
tific psychology just what such expressions mean” (ERE: 144). What I
take James to be claiming here is not that no scientific or philosophical
explanation of such parlance is possible, but rather that, for the sake of
a pragmatically oriented inquiry into the human powers, what matters
most is not the analytic definition of such vocabulary but rather the
kind of work it allow us to perform in our lives. In James’s words “from
this point of view philosophy is a pragmatic, comprehending, as tribu-

tary departments of itself, the old disciplines of logic, metaphysics, and
ethics” (ERE: 145). In “The Powers of Men” James urges us to appreciate
how the issue of energy is “a very pretty practical problem of national
economy, as well of individual ethics” (ERE: 149), thus characterizing its
philosophical scope within educational boundaries: the pressing ques-
tion for James is not “how to best ground such experiential evidences”
but rather “how to best train ourselves to such work of the self on the
self?” We would in fact have to test, challenge, and experiment with our
limits in practice rather than by building some theory pontificating on
those: for James life trails words and not the other way around, although
words for sure have all sorts of grips on us – some more dangerous than
others. We should teach ourselves to put formulas in the service of life,
and not vice versa, as that is the only way to a healthy examined life.
The philosophical and ethical stakes of such characterization are high:
in his career, and especially later in it when his reputation as a public
figure grew exponentially, James tackled some central social-political
issues precisely in these terms. I take James’s discussion of war, to which
I shall now turn, as paradigmatic of this kind of metaphilosophical
approach.20 In a series of texts dedicated to war and our relationship with
it we find, in fact, the missing piece bridging the alleged gap between
James’s moral discourse of individualism and the attention to social and
political considerations voiced by his philosophical detractors. There
James puts to work such hortatory conception of philosophical thinking
for the sake of envisioning novel paths of ethical reflection and activity
on pressing social-political issues.
The politics of the self: the example of war
War was a central interest and steady concern for James, and the expe-
rience of the American Civil war, as biographers and scholars alike
noted,21 was, for him, at once a formative and a disruptive event from
both a biographical and philosophical point of view. The Philippine-
American war experienced in his maturity and the Mexican-American
war of his infancy affected James both emotionally as a US citizen and
intellectually as a public figure, although perhaps to a lesser degree. In
fact, the experience of war (and most importantly the experience of
not actively participating in any of the ones mentioned, the former two
willingly while the latter because of his tender age) haunted James’s
personal and philosophical reflection on human nature, its possibility of
improvement and the limits of its modification. Despite many scattered
references in his writings, in two short but dense pieces James forcefully
addresses the issue of war and of our social-political conduct involved
in it more generally. Among other things, these essays still represent a
very witty and promising analysis of war, of its grip on our imagination,
and of its possible overcoming through a “moral equivalent” capable of
satisfying some deep entrenched energetic drives by conveying them
in virtuous and productive activities for human beings. James’s inten-
tions were surely critical, and yet perhaps lacking under more than one
aspect.22 But what I want to stress in this context is the general rhetoric
of these essays, which best exemplifies the themes I have touched upon
in this chapter. There we in fact see James engaged in the attempt to spur
us to challenge ourselves and a deep seated activity that is described as
at once aberrant and alluring, under certain aspects unavoidable and yet
expendable, in order to figure out novel practices and configurations
able to preserve the good features connected to it and get rid of the
despicable ones.23
In 1904, on the occasion of the World Peace Congress held in Boston,
James read a short text titled “Remarks at the Peace Banquet.” In it we
find condensed the ideas of a lifetime on war, its roots in our practical
constitution, and practical advantages, of which we shall find in a later
text a more articulated and definitive statement. James opens the essay
with some methodological considerations, introducing his argument
about the apparent inexorability of the grip that military discipline –
“the military status” that we find everywhere either actively practiced
or only theorized – always had and keeps having on human beings.
As James writes, in the political discourse over war “our permanent
enemy is the noted bellicosity of human nature.” It is important to
remark how James is convinced that such conditions affects individ-
uals and society at any level given our widespread powerful urge to see
our ideals, excitements, and prejudices recorded in the history books.
According to James, such a feature makes war, somewhat paradoxi-
cally, one of the few genuinely democratic sentiments featuring human
beings at all latitudes – a statement as true as it is vague, and some-
what in contrast with what James would later say about the difference
between, for example, the European and American thirst and striving
for war. James writes:
Not only men born to be soldiers, but non-combatants by trade and

nature, historians in their studies, and clergymen in their pulpits have
been war’s idealizers ... Our actual civilization, good and bad alike, has
had past wars for its determining condition. (ERM: 121)
For James, besides the utmost practical urge to see our preferences and
interests satisfied, even if by and at the cost of slashing and severing
others, another powerful ingredient fuels our inherited bellicosity:
namely, imagination and its thirst for always novel paths of discharge.
As he emphatically claims, “the truth is that people want war,” it being
“the final bouquet on life’s fireworks.” This is at once a descriptive and
a normative statement, since on the one hand James aims at indicating
a feature of our very practical constitution of beings seeking for excite-
ments capable of breaking the appalling spell of dull habit, while, on
the other, he is offering what he considers the only way out of this
deadlock. In fact, the issue is particularly difficult to address for a resolu-
tion because, as James states (and what we saw in the past few sections
corroborates it), this condition is both threatening and favorable: the
military discipline is in fact at once disruptive for its brutal outcomes
(the aggression and the killing) but also productive for its inbuilt disci-
pline (the empowerment of one’s energy).
This being the diagnosis of the matter, James claims that simply trying
to eradicate martial sentiments and warlike imagination is not only an
almost hopeless task to be accomplished, being so rooted in our prac-
tical constitution and historical memory, but also a somewhat weak-
ening solution for individual selves always on the verge of losing their
originality and highest possibilities because of deadening conducts and
unimaginative habits. What we need, according to James, would thus
be something radically different than what has been offered before by
those pacifists who resisted any war talk and expunged any value from it:
that is, we need to figure out new pathways through which maintaining
one’s imagination and conducts alive while avoiding the most unwel-
come outcomes of warlike processes of energization and empowerment.
For James, we should thus seek a sensible piecemeal reconstruction of
the problem rather than an unlikely grand substitution of it: “we must
go in for preventive medicine, not for radical cure. We must cheat our
foe, politically circumvent his action, and not try to change his nature”
(ERE: 122). To envision and provide this strategic antidote is the moving
theme of “A Moral Equivalent of War,” where James pushes his consider-
ations to their extreme consequences, with the goal in mind to succeed
in the “modest proposal” of finding a moral equivalent of warlike senti-
ments and passions that would hopefully satisfy militarist and pacifists
alike, serving our most practical exigencies of energetic beings without
endorsing wrongful conducts and policies “against civilization.”
In the essay, James reprises the rhetorical line of his previous text
and offers what might be pursued as a third way between the absolute
negation of any value and charm to belligerent strives claimed by the

pacifists and the abhorrence of cheap living without steeps by the mili-
tarists. James is, for sure, working with stark categories lacking impor-
tant nuances, as that supports his claim that what we need is a fresh
look at the question so as to envision a novel, mediating position, rather
than keep banging our heads against the walls of the two line-ups.
James, writing from the point of view of the “pacifist tho’ I am” – one
launching an ethical “war against war” – is in fact far too conscious of
the clash of temperaments between the two parties, which are hardly
reconcilable if not after a radical revision of at least some of their hidden
convictions and masked goals, which should be carefully acknowledged
and handled rather than bluntly dismissed at pain of nagging deadlocks.
According to James we should address the highest and noblest aims of
each party so as to invite a new inclusive exemplar of the good life,
having the strengths of both without the respective pitfalls.
James claims that the burden is all on the shoulder of the peace party
since, given the hardness of the militarists with their record of success
and their widespread popularity partly justified by their ability to sell
their agenda as the only viable (intellectual and practical) alternative
to socio-political idleness,24 it is very unlikely that they will be willing
to change their mind or soften their conclusions; yet this move is also
motivated by his willingness to acknowledge some critical edge to the
militarist rhetoric he is combatting, thus giving the burden of proof to
the amended pacifism he is sponsoring. James writes:
As things stand, I see how desperately hard it is to bring the peace-

party and the war-party together. I believe that the difficulty is due to
certain deficiencies in the program of pacifism which sets the milita-
rist imagination strongly, and to a certain extent justifiably, against
it. In the whole discussion both sides are on imaginative and senti-
mental ground. It is but one utopia against another, and everything
one says must be abstract and hypothetical (ERM: 165)
It is important to keep in mind that James is seeking a strategic, piece-

meal solution rather than a sudden, grand change of heart. One rightly
assessed argumentative stroke can be the key of a bigger dialectical
victory no matter how modest it is, as radical revolutions might dwell in
the most moderate policies. The secret to break the equilibrium is thus,
according to James, for the pacifist to speak a language that the militarist
can understand and inhabit: a language addressing her most pressing
energetic instincts and imaginative ideals. As James claims, the militarist
states that “if war has ever stopped, we should have to re-invent it to
redeem life from flat degeneration,” and thus the task of the pacifists
would be that of re-inventing war along ethically advantageous paths.
We should translate the strenuous and heroic mood enacted in war-like
situations, as well as the virtues articulating its implementation, and
project it in new contexts and practices that are morally acceptable and
profitable from a socio-political point of view.
Another key issue is that the military mood as James already stated in
VRE, is often (if not always) clothed in a mystical dress and as such its
grip on us is of the utmost powerful kind. Pacifists should learn from
such rhetorical mastery and start building an effective moral counter-
narrative of war capable of inflaming the spirits of individuals and make
them start to conduct themselves in virtuous ways. James writes:
Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the esthetical and ethical
point of view of their opponents. Do that first move in each contro-
versy, says J. J. Chapman, then move the point, and your opponent
will follow. So long as anti-militarists propose no substitutes for the
disciplinary function of war, no moral equivalent of war, analogous, as
one might say, to the mechanical equivalent of heat, so long they fail
to realize the full inwardness of the situation. (ERM: 168–9)
The conversion of a destructive ideal into a constructive one is thus,

according to James, one of the moral tasks ahead of us, but such a project
should necessarily proceed piecemeal from one’s individual endorsement
of such a revolutionary attitude, rather than imposed from above by
means of some national (or international) strategy. Big organizations are
in fact unable of such a shift, which should be propelled by the “molec-
ular moral forces,” spreading from individual to individual. It is once
again individuals that James is addressing, whatever their place and role
in society, as what needs to be enacted is a personal transformation in the
ways in which each one of us store, control, and unleash one’s personal
energies. If the martial type of character can be bred without the cult and
practice of war, it is, for James, due to our ability to individually “inflame
the civic temper as past history has inflamed the military temper.” The
perspective of a future in which “the supreme theatre of human strenu-
ousness is closed” is in fact a terrible and hardly acceptable one because
our energies and powers would be systematically blocked, disregarded,
and finally deadened, hence our higher possibilities slashed.
James closes the essay with an apology of civil society (and of civil
sociality) and its underrated energetic potential representing a genuine
moral equivalent of war yet to be fully empowered. It is for James in the

individuality of each worker and thinker, and especially in the ones mostly
out of sight and off the official records, that we can find the virtues associ-
ated with war at work for the construction of a morally hospitable world:
namely, fidelity, cohesiveness, tenacity, heroism, conscience, education,
inventiveness, economy, wealth, and physical strength.25 James celebrates
such overlooked molecular acts of heroism and is keen to remark how
such fine models already exemplify the best candidates of pacifist equiva-
lents of martial virtues –contrasting them with the ethical apathy of those
numb communities running from any kind of socio-political friction he
depicts in “The Gospel of Relaxation.” We should encourage such heroic
moods and advertise them in every instance we see them expressed in
someone’s deeds and conduct. James is in fact convinced that, by under-
going this process of self-experimentation and self-transformation, we
may enact a politics of the self exalting and intensifying the productive
and constructive aspects of our civic associated lives. The celebration of
activity as he sees it expressed in individual daily strokes of resistance and
effort represents thus for James the key for shaking the deepest strings
of the human soul in ways which are both productive for the life of the
individual mind and for collective political conducts.
For James this growing force would hopefully mount and invest with
its molecular forces virtually every aspect of our ordinary, associated
life, operating a change in the socio-political conditions that is similar
to the one that each individual should undergo in order to overcame
the ethical “human blindness” he speaks of in the famed essay. In fact,
James writes that one of the desired and possible results of such working
would precisely be the acknowledgment of our blindness toward certain
social dynamics and inherited injustices in view of their ameliora-
tion. James briefly takes issue with the socialist literature of his time,
which campaigned for the improvement of the disadvantaged class by
focusing on their economical situation only, thus leaving aside their
most important ethical condition, representing for James the key for
social and political change. He claims that, if any real advancement
shall be achieved in society, it should be driven by strokes of heroism,
since “inferiority is always with us” threatening and endangering the
self despite its socio-economical condition. James invites us to nurture
the deepest strains of subjectivity in order to find the resources to eman-
cipate from the statutes of minority that socio-economical conditions
would “only ratify.”26
James is certainly not offering any cheap or ready-made solution, and
his discourse has the shape of an exhortation to explore and invent yet
new ways of conducting ourselves so to strive for the better self we might
become through unbroken acts of courage and commitment to a higher
way of living. This is for James the road to peace and perhaps to some-
thing much valuable at the heart of it: that is, a meaningful and rich
social and political life, in which individuals do seek for always more
congenial and productive ways of engaging themselves and each other
in the hope of solving those tensions and conflicts at the core of their
shared practices. Human flourishing is thus, for James, the outcome of
an ethical investment in the energies and powers of individuals in their
unbroken attempts to challenge themselves in ways that are more rather
than less productive for the life of the community in which they thrive
or rather stagnate.
On James’s legacy, actual and potential
War is just one example of James’s practical concerns as they related to

what I have called the politics of the self. Many more can be spotted
in his work, and most importantly there is virtually no limit in trying
to extend and work out in detail his framework to address our most
pressing ethical troubles – some of which are, unfortunately and despite
a whole century of social and political fights, still with us today. James
does not give us any final list of problems, to be tackled allegedly shaping
the agenda of “moral philosophy” understood as a casuistry discipline,
but rather offers us examples of how to best engage in piecemeal inter-
ventions in cultural criticism, presenting pragmatism as one possibility
in such reflective practice. While one can surely blame James for his
overlooking of some more or less important battles – by the way, who
is to decide which is which, or even what would count as a meaningful
battle? – or partial commitment to the ones he focused on in his writ-
ings, nothing prevents us from trying to extend his views and argu-
mentative machinery to new or overlooked territories. I find it far less
productive to blame James for his political lacks, and more challenging
to see where he could philosophically lead us and how much road can
we cover with him.
Let me close this chapter with a comment on the alleged coherency
of James and its importance for us today, voiced in the last paragraph.
James’s social and political philosophy (or lack thereof) has been fiercely
attacked in the past century. Garrison and Madden (1977) best exem-
plify the harsh criticism this portion of his work has attracted: too
many ethical blind spots and only a dim and mostly third-personal
commitment to even those causes he embraced in print depict a James
far more conservative and inattentive than the progressive attentive

self he encourages us to become. One might be sympathetic with this
line of criticism, which has indubitably some purchase and appeal, yet
we might want to read James as a moral philosopher (rather than as a
moral exemplar himself) and learn a lot from his words in the measure
in which they work for us and make us act in progressive and productive
ways, whatever our reservations about James’s own personal capacity to
live up to them – although I would suggest the reader approach his work
mindful of the context in which James was operating, whose distance
from ours he greatly contributed to shrink, hence adjusting our criteria
for judging the persona behind the thinker. That said, it is somewhat
unfortunate that James was not as brave as, say, John Stuart Mill or Jane
Addams (to name but two thinkers James greatly admired and with
whom he confronted himself) in accompanying his views in print with
more actions or in having more radical views.
It is not so much a matter of coherence of his views with his deeds and
actions, then, but rather a matter of his ability (that is his willingness
and courage) to see the extents of his own ideas and the limitations of his
own conduct. And perhaps it can be said that this is in line with James’s
belief in the perfectibility of individuals: rather than instructing us from
the above of some privileged moral podium he thought he occupied,
James was striving to ameliorate himself, along with his readers, mindful
of the unceasing activity behind such exercises of self-experimentation
and self-transformation. If James’s imagination was able to stretch only
as far as it did, why can’t we try to do our best with our thoughts and
talents (and perhaps further extend his work in novel directions) rather
than fixate on the limits of James? This exercise of self-criticism would
enable us to keep well in view the limitations of others – in this case
James’s – without, however, depriving us of the possibility of seeing, not
only the good in their biographies, but also (and, in the case at hand,
more importantly) the promising character of their philosophies.
We can surely protest (both as scholars of the thinker and as admirers
of the person, or the other way around as well) that James could not see
how certain of the things he did or failed to do were in apparent contrast
with what he wrote, but it is a far less interesting and productive busi-
ness to accuse him of not having been more or less radical than he was:
there are plenty of other authors and figures we can turn our attention
to if unsatisfied with James, only let’s not blame him for not living up
to what others wrote! In the end, the beauty of a philosophy such as
James’s lies exactly in its candor: he is not promising more than he said
he would deliver, and thus we should be careful in not projecting on it
external desiderata. And if we take seriously his words on the tempera-

mental spring of philosophical discourse and the companion admoni-
tion to trespass such natural-cultural intertwinement to seek discursive
and practical certainty, then we should not be surprised if James would
have warmly encouraged any such form of internal criticism.
As I have tried to show in this chapter, we can find in his moral
philosophy resources to respond to some of the concerns advanced
to his social-political thought, as he himself envisioned some of those
lines of criticism and decided to address them by reaffirming those views
generating them in the first place. However, this does not mean that
we could not ask for something different in the belief that the picture
James offered us cannot lead us where we would like to be lead. James
had precise goals, and I have tried to show how his reflective tools were
sharp enough for the job. We might well have other goals altogether,
even opposite to the ones voiced by James – a fact that would only enrich
the conversation. But, in order to challenge James profitably, we should
first give the thinker his dues and acknowledge his concerns, eventually
noticing how they might have been better addressed otherwise or acted
upon differently in the light of his own framework and ideas. That too
would in the end be yet another sign of having absorbed James’s anti-
prescriptive, exhortative lesson: that is, understanding and practicing
philosophy as a reflective and critical activity that opens up possibili-
ties rather than trying to narrow them down to fit some confined and
incorrigible theory. James offers no such theory, but instead invites us to
critically explore what he takes to be a promising outlook, with no fixed
boundaries and principles. We can, if we like, be unimpressed with such
exhortations, historicist and tentative as they are; only, let’s not treat
them as final statements, on pains of betraying the spirit with which
James advanced them.
Conclusion: The Seeds of a
Revolution in Moral Philosophy
In this work I have offered a selective and perspectival – yet hopefully

broad and sufficiently resourceful – reconstruction of James’s moral
thought, along two main directions: the critique of ethics – understood
as the advancement of prescriptive requirements on the moral life under
the form of moral theories; and the companion presentation of an alter-
native way of framing its strategies and goals – which I have character-
ized, after James himself, as hortatory, sketching some of the ramified
consequences and applications. These two synchronized moments, or
movements, can be thought of as respectively the pars destruens and the
pars construens of James’s ethics, which, as I have suggested, are at work
in his moral writings and in a series of other texts (on psychology, truth,
and the politics of the self) that are of ethical significance or relevance.
Through the articulation of the interplay of these two registers and of
their respective subtexts, I have traced an internal path in his work
on ethics, showing its philosophical short-circuits with other areas of
discourse. In particular, I have argued how the anti-theoretical theme
intertwines with the most positive one of re-thinking the very shape and
stakes of a philosophical reflection on ethics, showing how this critical
stance is best understood against the background of a therapeutic and
transformational register informing James’s metaphilosophy. Once rid
of the allure and craving for systems of morality, and having denounced
their many dangers and pitfalls, James sketches a novel, more promising
path for ethics to explore and experiment with in the course of one’s
ordinary life. This, I have contended, represents the gist of James’s work
in moral philosophy and of his work as a moral philosopher.
Far from covering all the aspects of James’s moral thought and
exhausting every possible explanation of the many diverse occurrences
of ethical consideration, I have rather tried to complicate, at least in
248
part, the received, widespread, and still healthy picture of James as a

moral theorist, showing how once such a widely accredited interpreta-
tion is not taken for granted – but rather questioned from the inside – a
new, perhaps more interesting ethical line might be detected in his rich
and resourceful work. I have presented James’s moral thought in the
light of the problematization of our life with morality – and thus of
our life of the mind, of our practices of truth and experience, and of
our socio-political activity – showing how James was interested in high-
lighting a distinctive dialectics of loss/recovery of meaningfulness, at
play in our ordinary practice and related to the kind of work on the self
(on one’s assumptions, biases, and limitations) altogether necessary for
one’s moral cultivation and personal flourishing. In so doing I offered a
new key to reading James as a moral philosopher who offered his readers
critical instructions on how best to proceed in moral reflection with the
goal of ameliorating the moral life.
This project revolved around the rethinking of the very notion and
character of the moral philosopher, as understood and characterized in
James’s work, and in particular around the central theme of the possi-
bility of a non-foundational relationship between moral reflection and
the moral life. As I have been arguing, in order to appreciate the shift
of attention to, and renegotiation of, the very method, strategy, and
subject matter of ethics – so skillfully articulated in James’s writings –
we should pay attention to the metaphilosophical views and insights
which inform this operation and are internal to his moral thought. I
have been thus constantly – almost obsessively – reminding myself and
the reader to pay such attention, and in this chapter I shall draw some
final remarks on the journey undertaken by reprising and glossing some
of these metaphilosophical themes.
Reshaping ethics
The Oxford Dictionary of English gives a composite definition of ethics

that nicely accounts for both our ordinary understanding of the word
and for its reflective counterpart: “1. Moral principles that govern a
person’s behavior or the conducting of an activity; 2. The branch of
knowledge that deals with moral principles.” If, extending the line
of thought by Rorty used as the epigraph of this work, the point of
philosophical critique is to survey and question our ordinary moral
vocabulary expressive of our moral life, as well as the philosophical
one parasitic on it and generated from such reflective activities, then
James’s meta-moral philosophy can be read as an instance of such
composite exercise swinging back and forth from the ordinary to the
reflective dimension of experience, language and conduct in a stepwise
critical movement.
One of the key insights of James as a moral philosopher is that the
ethical question “How ought one live?” does not merely – nor princi-
pally – ask which particular actions one should undertake, and which
principles one should follow when doing so, but rather which overall
perspective on oneself (one’s mindedness) and the world (one’s worldli-
ness) should one take, and how should one account for, criticize, and
experiment with oneself? Such questionings do involve an imaginative
work of personal examination that is directly relevant to the articula-
tion of one’s ethical life along pragmatist lines. The very intelligibility of
these questions represents the condition of possibility of seeing moral
reflection as a form of personal clarification of the concepts and experi-
ences one lives by. So characterized, ethics can be said to have a character
of pervasivity, since all our inquiries and activities might be touched and
guided by moral scruples – for example, scruples about the significance
of a certain thought or conduct, its relationship with our subjectivity
and with the context in which it takes place.
More particularly, according to this pragmatist approach the aim of
moral reflection would be to get rid of some superstitious views about
the genealogy of one’s ideas and ideals, and the companion foundational
anxieties according to which the moral life is exemplified by a series
of moral prescriptions which we either fail or succeed in respecting.
Theories – in this case moral ones – should be considered, according to
James, to be instruments for conducting one’s life, rather than resting
places for the stiffening and deadening of our practices. Pragmatism,
understood as a philosophical method, aims precisely at cashing out
their meaning by putting them to work, rather than investing them with
meaning from outside their exercise. In a later text, PU, James would
attack similar tendencies and presumptions as forms of that pervasive
“vicious intellectualism” haunting our ordinary as well as our reflective
life. James sought a philosophy that would investigate, challenge, and
eventually discard such intellectualistic temptations, in all their forms,
by critiquing our thoughts from the point of view of our deeds. In the
ethical domain, such questioning takes the form of analyzing how we
handle the moral life and its difficulties as they originate in deceiving
pictures of the ways in which we are initiated to moral concepts and
experiences.
James’s fierce humanism, celebrating the piecemeal yet relentless
construction of the world we live in, and his skepticism toward any
grand teleological story of the way things necessarily hang together

inform the particular orientation of his therapeutic exhortations:
the celebration of inventive activity in both its critical and ordinary
dimensions, as against the faithful mirroring of a reality with which we
have no creative commerce, finds expression in his insistence on the
centrality of freedom, understood as a willful edification and transfor-
mation of the self with the resources and tactics one finds within one’s
conduct. James discarded with force any narrative of progress in terms
of an adjustment to standards established outside historical human
activities. The outcome of such positioning is nothing short of a secular
re-enchantment of the world through the practices of the self: we might
well lose secure foundations and finalistic certainties, but what we gain
are fresh resources and tools to tentatively investigate and revise our
ways of world-making.
The critical analysis and practical intensification of activity as it
articulates our conduct represent the metaphilosophical horizon and
normative ideal of Jamesian pragmatic ethics. By claiming that what
must change is our very attitude or sensibility toward the norms and
principles one lives by, James re-orients its whole purpose of moral
reflection, shifting the center of interest from moral theory to the self’s
relationship with morality, and thus emphasizing the therapeutic char-
acter and transformative dimension of philosophical investigations
performed in a pragmatic key. James sets moral reflection on new anti-
foundational rails, inviting us to look at our ordinary practices in order
to sort out a moral philosophy best apt to address them, rather than
regulating them from the outside. The exhortations James dispenses
to the moral philosopher and the layperson alike seek a delicate equi-
librium between the reflective and the ordinary: they address human
beings in the midst of their moral inquiries, with the goal in mind
of enlightening and refining such practices from the inside of their
exercise rather than by imposing standards on them from an idealized
elsewhere.
This approach to moral philosophy can be profitably contrasted with
both the prescriptive thrust animating contemporary normative ethics
and the neutral explanatory pretension informing its meta-ethical coun-
terpart. To the former James reproaches the pretention of determining
and regulating the moral life by reference to a system of normative
considerations, while of the latter he disapproves the alleged impar-
tiality of its analyses. The hortatory register featuring his pragmatic
moral philosophy moves through the lines of the meta-ethics/norma-
tive ethics divide in order to enrich both: its aspiration is in fact that
of being descriptive and yet normative without being either regulative

or disinterested. The moral philosopher should thus neither be a moral
theorist – telling us what ethics is about, nor a moral propagandist –
pushing a particular ethical agenda: not a moralist castling behind her
ethical outlook or an unengaged analyst scared of betraying any positive
view, but rather a moral therapist seeking to ameliorate the moral life by
means of perspicuous descriptions and engaging instructions.
According to James we should turn our ears to philosophy, not in
the promise of answers but rather because of its capacity to complicate
and possibly throw light on the questions we feel compelled and find
compelling to ask. For James, philosophy, understood and practiced as an
unbroken questioning and work of the self on the self, aims at singling
out recurring dynamics and resisting as many temptations featuring
our ways of thinking and conducting ourselves: pragmatism is one of
those therapeutic devices of the examined life which tells a story about
human flourishing and its impediments. James traveled the narrow path
of thinking and practicing philosophy as a method of transformative
self-questioning, as against a theory unlocking a set of answers, a form
of critique rather than a dispenser of solutions.
According to this picture progress in philosophy is of a personal kind:
it consists in the ability to find one’s way and figure out what prevents
one from seeing clearly into one’s practices in the first place – and why.
Pragmatism offers a particular story of what such impediments and
such clearness consist of in the first place. In James’s hands philosophy
becomes a critical, melioristic attitude and exercise which recommends
us to look better and in the right place to address the worries that taunt
us. This device might work for some people at some particular conjunc-
tions of time and not for others: it is up to us to discover what kind
of person we are. That said, it has to be noted that James neither gave
prominence to, nor put a lot of work into the, historical and material
details of such condition (that is the contingencies that brought our
culture into the position to ask such very questions), depicting such
choices as recurring features and possibilities of what we might call our
human condition, assuming one form or another dependently on the
contingencies in which it is enacted and trialed.
James as a philosopher’s philosopher and as a

philosopher for the everyday
One of the central themes animating my reconstruction of James has

been the focus on his steady concern for the way philosophers should be
understanding their own reflective business and (consequently) for the

way moral philosophy should be practiced in a way to fruitfully bear on
the moral life. Furthermore, I have shown how for James this concern
should not take the form of a sharp and stark divide between the reflec-
tive and the ordinary, as he strived to convey a picture of their possible
dialogues along non-foundational lines. As argued in the introduc-
tion, I read James as a public philosopher engaging us as philosophers
in our reflective attitudes and as human beings dealing with our most
practical conundrums, constantly urging us to resist the temptation to
depict the two figures as leading separate lives of the mind. This way of
understanding philosophical investigation represents the background
to making sense of James’s distinctive work as a moral philosopher. In
order to understand what ethics says or should be saying (its contents and
strategies) for James we should have a firm grasp about what ethics does
or should be doing (its scope and point). The therapeutic and transforma-
tional register informing his moral thought is thus grounded in a radical
redescription of the nature and task of philosophical activity. As I have
argued at length in the book, this method and attitude are themselves
morally significant since they prompt the subject to perform a work on
the self that aims at a (Nietzschean) re-evaluation of one’s thoughts and
conduct: hence the hortatory tone and transformative point of his work
in moral philosophy.
This heterodox interpretation of James’s pragmatism, although still
suspect, has now gained at least some reputation in the literature,
even if interpreters have been generally resistant to give it serious
consideration when approaching his work on ethics, which is still too
often recounted as a more or less successful exercise in moral system-
atization – meta-ethical or normative alike. In his work on prag-
matic moral philosophy Sami Pihlström (2005) effectively articulates
the metaphilosophical cipher of James’s ethics along similar lines,
comparing it with various strands of Wittgensteinian moral philoso-
phy.1 The author focuses in fact on the intertwinement between prag-
matist and Wittgensteinian ethics, which share an anti-foundational
understanding of moral thought and a therapeutic conception of
philosophical activity, showing their communal understanding of
philosophy as a tool for self-transformation aimed at questioning
both one’s ordinary and intellectual assumptions and temptations,
in order to possibly put them at ease. In particular, Pihlström claims
that, according to such a pragmatist-Wittgensteinian perspective
“philosophical problems are always already humanly significant prob-
lems ... if they are problems worth considering at all.” In this sense
the role of the philosopher would be a practical one, and philosophy,

even the most theoretical kind, would be au fond applied philosophy.
Pihlström comments that:
This is not to say that our human problems, the Deweyan prob-
lems of men, or the kind of personally agonizing ethical issues that
Wittgensteinian thinkers often consider, must be popular or easily
understandable. They may be, so to speak, “theoretically” difficult
problems. Their adequate treatment may require deep theoretical
understanding of philosophical and scientific traditions. The idea
that anyone (“the man from the street”) could, without proper educa-
tion, thoroughly understand the “problems of men” she or he shares
with her or his fellow human beings is by no means a part of my
reconstrual of Deweyan or Wittgensteinian pragmatism. (2005: 95)
This passage nicely sets the tone for an understanding of the Deweyan
indictment in a way that it does not encourage separation of the ordi-
nary and reflective dimensions of our philosophical investigations,
but rather points to their continuity and contiguity. The problems of
philosophy should thus be ordinary problems, although their produc-
tive engagement and hopeful dissolution might take highly rarified
philosophical skills and tricks with their own shifting history. Both
James and Wittgenstein wanted a philosophy permeable to the ordi-
nary, in which the reflective would pervade the everyday and vice
versa, and in which the critical and the unproblematic represented
phases of the same process of inquiry and path of clarification. In
the end, it can be equally said that, as much as laypersons might not
(and often so) understand philosophers, philosophers might not (and
unfortunately so) understand laypersons. Neither of the two figures is
in principle smarter than the other, or deals with more difficult issues.
Thus, it can be confidently claimed that, when communication breaks
down, both sides can be held equally responsible and need to share
the blame – for example, philosophers for dealing with unserviceable
issues, lay people for refusing to make an effort to question themselves
in the first place.
Pihlström completes the picture of how to practice philosophy in a
pragmatist-Wittgensteinian way by stressing the therapeutic nature
of philosophical activity so understood, noticing how the outcome of
such enterprise is precisely a particular work of the self on the self – a
work professed by philosophers (or by ordinary beings in such reflective
clothes) yet to be implemented by ordinary beings (whether philoso-

phers or not). Pihlström writes:
The tradition of pragmatism, early and late, takes the medical analogy
seriously: the image of a healthy human being is a fair picture of the
pragmatists’ ideal of an active, functional person who assesses her
or his theoretical and even philosophical concepts and conceptions
by turning toward the future and by facing their actual or potential
practical consequences. When those consequences are different from
what was expected, what we need is “inquiry”; not, however, inquiry
as a strictly scientific enterprise ... but rather a therapeutic reinterpre-
tation of the problematic situation, with the aim of accommodating
ourselves to the new circumstances. A position of this kind is implicit
both in classical pragmatists (for example, James and Dewey) and
in post-Wittgensteinian neopragmatism (in addition to Rorty and
McDowell, in Putnam’s work, in particular). (2005: 101)
In this picture the kind of philosophical activity called for by pragma-

tists and Wittgensteinians alike is of a therapeutic kind: one’s concep-
tions become tools for reflection and self-scrutiny, and their possible
uses constitute the very subject matter of philosophical inquiry and
clarification. Laypersons and philosophers are on a continuum in this
reflective-critical inquiry, and we, as philosophers, should resist the
temptation to create a bridge between the two and thus encouraging
a dualism of interests, methods, and goals. According to these thinkers
philosophy should get rid of its own stratified pretentions to regulate
the ordinary, and rather learn (again) how to best serve it.
Harvey Cormier suggested a similar parallelism between James’s
and Wittgenstein’s delicate attempts to address the worries haunting
philosophers and ordinary beings (especially those relying on what the
former write) alike. Cormier claims that philosophical work might yield
to ordinary life (thus establishing a genuine connection between these
thinkers with the philosophical tradition) and yet resist the traditional
way of understanding such a grip, as both unhelpful and a major source
of trouble (thus emancipating them from the tradition in important
ways). The way the two thinkers carried out this project – described as
a form of “realistic” philosophy critical of both “idealism” and “empiri-
cism” – is, however and according to Cormier,2 quite different:
There is more than one path to nonphilosophical “realism” ... One

path, Wittgenstein’s, involves explicitly renouncing certain questions
and dealings with unrealistic delusions and fantasies by therapeu-

tically changing the subject ... The other path, James’s, involves
steering us back from fantasy to reality in a different way: instead of
renouncing those questions, James reinterprets their terms to such
an extent before answering them that his answers still amount to
antidelusional therapy. (Cormier 2001: 5)
Despite this difference, James and Wittgenstein share more than

a feature of this attempt of re-attuning us to “the ways things really
work in life and the ways in which we really do things.” In particular,
both authors seem to voice both strategies and engage in both kinds of
therapy. Wittgenstein appears at times to be trying to rejoin traditional
philosophy, rather than reject its wholesale approach; trying to overturn
it from the inside, as James usually does. Equally, James seems to be
willing to shaking off philosophy’s anxieties altogether, trying to dele-
gitimize it, without the possibility of any redemption à la Wittgenstein.
Jamesian pragmatism and Wittgensteinian philosophy thus converge
on several metaphilosophical points, although their strategies some-
times differ.
In his survey of pragmatist moral philosophy Alan Ryan arrives at a
similar conclusion, noticing one more common path shared by the two
thinkers. The comparison this time is not at the most general level of
their philosophical method but rather focuses on their respective ethical
approach:
In the same way as Wittgenstein’s later philosophy, pragmatist reflec-

tion on ethics attempts to abolish (one part of) philosophy by philo-
sophical means, and induces the same anxiety about how to describe
the activity that is not philosophy in the disapproved sense but looks
very like a form of philosophy. (Ryan 2010: 217)
Pragmatist reflection, conducted in the Jamesian way, would thus aim

at rendering perspicuous an alternative way of doing moral philosophy,
recalling Wittgenstein’s attempt to practice ethics.3 Rather than eman-
cipating from the proper forms of philosophical argumentation and
activity, or going as far as dismissing them altogether, James imagines
among his goals envisioning new ways of thinking and practicing moral
philosophy that, however, would not resemble the philosophical system-
atizations he was resisting and condemning. In particular, the goal of
a renewed moral reflection would be, according to James, a particular
kind of personal clarification: the recovering from a superstitious state
in which we think of our human possibilities as already inscribed in

the abstract dictates of a morality system, and the re-affirmation of
the immanent human dimension of our ordinary and reflective moral
practices.
In this work I have tried to show how James elaborated an ethical
version of this way of understanding and proceeding in philosophical
investigation, his legacy in the contemporary debate over the nature
and scope of moral thought could be profitably investigated along
these lines. In fact, not only does James’s moral philosophy represent
a most promising approach to look at (and build on) for the sake of
our current ordinary and reflective ethical investigations, but his lesson
has survived in and through the work of a number of authors, both
inside and outside pragmatism, who have more or less directly furthered
aspects of his agenda, authors whose work can be fruitfully compared to
that of yet others who have arrived at similar diagnoses, despite the radi-
cally different philosophical outlook and motivations.4 I plan to fully
articulate that this aspect in my next monograph,5 a counter-history of
twentieth-century moral philosophy from the point of view of pragma-
tist moral philosophy; and yet I hope that some of its shape and motiva-
tions resonate already in the pages that the reader has just covered. In
particular, I aim to investigate the main tenets of pragmatist ethics in
its dialogues with two other heterodox traditions in twentieth-century
moral philosophy, sharing with pragmatism an anti-foundational, ther-
apeutic philosophical agenda and an anti-legalistic approach to moral
reflection. I have here in mind Wittgensteinian moral philosophy –
which shares with pragmatism the idea of what I shall call “the primacy
of therapy over theory” – and virtue ethics – which shares with prag-
matism the emphasis on “self-constitution and the care of the self” as
primary moral activities. The next paragraph functions as a preamble
for that project.
James and contemporary meta-moral philosophy:

a working agenda
Despite repeatedly claiming that James’s ethics is quite unlike any other
philosophical account in its refutation of many of the mainstream
features of his contemporary debate, it has been far from my inten-
tion to confine the study of James to a mere exegetical exercise in the
history of philosophy. I have, in fact, drawn attention to a number of
promising connections between James and a number of thinkers, both
within and outside pragmatism, who share with him the project and
task of envisioning ethical inquiry along non-foundational and non-

prescriptive – yet critical – lines. Long disregarded as a moral thinker,
I feel confident in saying that we never stopped learning from James
through the work of more respected philosophers we still read and with
whom we feel more confident to engage with.
James occupies a privileged position at an important juncture in
western moral philosophy: he both initiated with Charles S. Peirce a new
pragmatist course for philosophical inquiry, which was able to channel
a handful of different intellectual thrusts and tendencies (mostly of
empiricist stripe but also of Kantian-Hegelian ancestry), while equally
opposing the moral systematizations of the previous four centuries
(Hobbes to Mill) and witnessed the harboring of a wider and somewhat
independent revolution in philosophical ethics (Sidgwick and Moore).
In this respect his philosophical project was in fact congenial to yet
another revolt against systematization that was taking place in Europe
(and especially in Great Britain) at around the same time, under the
name of analytic philosophy. At the beginning of the twentieth century
moral philosophy underwent a radical twist, following a very general
shift in metaphilosophical orientation, from “the age of systems” to
what Morton White aptly called “the age of analysis” (White 1956).
However, one should not be misled by the label: by “analysis,” White
understood a generalized method, style, and aim common to “pragma-
tist,” “continental” and “analytic” philosophers alike.6
With other emerging philosophical schools – most notably, but as I
say not exclusively, analytic philosophy – pragmatism was dissatisfied
with the way philosophical ethics has been understood and practiced
in the past four centuries. The aim of philosophical reflection was now
claimed to be the examination of moral discourse from within of its
exercise, abandoning the business of building substantive and compre-
hensive moral systems. Having dismissed the clothes of the moralist –
who championed a precise picture of the ethical life as a part of a grand
philosophical system, behind which lurked some metaphysical or natu-
ralistic picture of human nature – the work of the moral philosopher
was claimed to be a critical one. However, pragmatism and analytic
moral philosophy explored this possibility in radically opposite direc-
tions: analytic philosophy – or, to be slightly more precise, one central,
orthodox strand of it – sharply distinguished philosophical reflection
on ethics (meta-ethics) from a positive pronouncement on ordinary
moral life, while at the same time envisioning a foundational relation-
ship between the two (to be performed by normative ethics, contin-
uing in this sense the old project of an action-guiding and prescriptive
reflective inquiry); pragmatism rejected this divide, and re-interpreted

moral reflection as an activity aimed at addressing our genuine practical
dilemmas without trying to rule our lives disregarding their contingen-
cies by means of a theory of human nature, nor limiting to give an alleg-
edly neutral and abstract explanation of the workings of moral norms
and principles as disengaged from what we empirically know about
historically situated human beings.
Contrary to mainstream theorizing, pragmatism stressed the radically
practical character of ethical reflection, whose analyses and elucida-
tions aim at changing and making a difference to our ways of thinking
and conduct, without however pretending to prescribe models of the
good life by means of a theory or recommend allegedly neutral (that
is, non-moral) pieces of reasoning. Pragmatism in fact denounced the
shortcomings of any reflective stance, disregarding the ordinary dimen-
sion of moral life. In so doing, pragmatism envisioned a very promising
practical alternative to both the moralizations typical of the previous
season of philosophical reflection on ethics and the often-dry intellectu-
alization of the moral discourse distinctive of early analytic philosophy
(and yet still with us and informing our contemporary debate): namely,
understanding and practicing ethics as a critical problematization of the
moral notions and principles we live by for their piecemeal clarification
and amelioration. Pragmatism has not been alone in this intellectual
battle: as (at least) two other traditions – internal to analytic philosophy
and yet representing heterodox variations of it – shared similar concerns
with regards to the old canon in moral philosophy and the new ortho-
doxy of the analytic, driven by legalistic aims and prescriptive ambi-
tions: namely, Wittgensteinian moral philosophy and virtue ethics.
In this shifting intellectual and cultural context I suggest to read the
ethical work of these kindred traditions as an attempt to rethink the
very figure and role of the moral philosopher, who should neither be
thought of as a “partisan moralist,” preaching substantive moral views,
nor as a “disengaged analyst,” unwilling to take any part in ordinary
moral debate – but rather, an “intellectual midwife,” practicing ethics as
a reflective exercise, critiquing one’s assumptions and commitments in
moral discourse. In particular, pragmatism shares with Wittgensteinian
moral philosophy the insistence on philosophical therapy as the key
methodological feature of an anti-theoretical and anti-foundational
approach to moral reflection, while with virtue ethics it shares the
return to the vocabulary of self-cultivation and the care of the self, as a
much needed antidote to the legalistic thrust of much of contemporary
moral thought. It is furthermore important to notice the convergence of
these two other heterodox traditions dialoguing with pragmatism, as we

can both find therapeutic intentions in virtue ethics and perfectionist
pitches in Wittgensteinian philosophy.
I shall claim that these are the themes around which it is possible to
build a counter-narrative of twentieth-century moral philosophy from a
pragmatist viewpoint, reconstructing in particular the legacy of James’s
moral conception in the contemporary ethical debate. The contribution
that James’s moral thought can give to the current ethical debate and
its recent history would thus be that of delineating an alternative to
the legalistic prescriptivism of the morality system along which under-
standing the methods and goals of moral reflection. Exploring the syner-
gies between these heterodox authors and traditions might thus restore
a more complex picture of twentieth-century moral philosophy and put
in the proper light the important contribution of James and pragmatism
in this dialogue. Let me attach a few names to such too general labels.
Beginning with the pragmatist lineage in moral philosophy, the work
of James found a most powerful ally in John Dewey, who is rightly
considered as the most important (surely the most prolific!) moral
philosopher in the pragmatist tradition.7 As a series of new, seminal
studies has showed, Dewey shared with James an anti-foundational
and broadly secularist account of the moral life, and understood ethical
inquiry as the piecemeal criticism of the norms and concepts we live
by from the inside of our moral practices and institutions. According
to Dewey, philosophical ethics should drop altogether its pretensions
to regulate morality by means of theories and/or to account for it in
a dispassionate way, and rather help human beings deal in ever more
progressive ways with the problems they find on the way to self-reali-
zation and communal living. In Dewey we thus find an unmistakable
meliorism animating his reconstructions of ethics, finding expression
in a moral philosophy centered on the subject’s relationship with her
ethical inheritance and aimed at her flourishing in and through her
practical activities.
A similar approach can also be found in the work of three other
illustrious representative of pragmatism: R. B. Perry, C. I. Lewis, and
Morton White.8 Even though these mid-century philosophers worked
in a profoundly different intellectual and cultural climate – namely,
the professionalized academy, in which the practical fieldwork and
political activity accompanying one’s engaged writing left the floor to
technical debates in seminar rooms and exchanges in academic jour-
nals – these authors managed to convey in successful ways the ethical
and metaphilosophical teachings of James (and Dewey), which they also
implemented with the views and approaches of thinkers outside the

pragmatist circle. In particular, what is of interest for this study is their
common attempt to translate the message of James, about the practical
character of ethical reflection, into the somewhat technical language
preferred by that generation of philosophers – and still much in vogue.
In their work we can in fact appreciate the attempt to revise both meta-
ethics and normative ethics from within, showing on the one hand how
meta-ethical analyses are not at all the neutral descriptive devices they
were claimed to be by the analytic orthodoxy, and on the other how
normative theories should emerge from ordinary practices rather than
imposing on them.
Finally, some among the most important contemporary pragmatist
moral philosophers – most notably, Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam,
Richard Rorty, Richard Bernstein, and Charlene Seigfried9 – explicitly
acknowledged their debt to, and inspiration from, James (among other
pragmatists) for the articulation of their own original philosophical
work. These authors variously remarked on the anti-theoretical theme
informing James’s philosophy, and in particular his moral thought, and
employed such a register in their own philosophical and ethical work.
These authors have in fact stressed the importance of James’s therapeutic
approach to ethics once combined with Deweyian’s own strand of moral
anti-foundationalism, and gave it new lymph by using it to challenge
some of the most entrenched assumptions of contemporary moral
philosophy. The debunking of the fact–value dichotomy, the critique
of metaphysical realism in ethics, the articulation of a non-relativistic
ethical pluralism, the rejection of principles and teleological arguments
in ethics, and the ethical primacy of care and attention over duty and
obligations, are only a selection of themes informing the moral thought
of these authors, who often build their own views with an eye to the
forgotten lesson of classical pragmatism.
If we now move outside the pragmatist circle (or rather away from
its most immediate center), we find other thinkers sympathetic with
James’s radical approach to philosophical ethics. Wittgensteinian moral
philosophy – variously enacted by Iris Murdoch, Cora Diamond, Stanley
Cavell, and John McDowell10 – and some fringes of virtue ethics (using
this category rather broadly) – as practiced by Annette Baier, Bernard
Williams, Martha Nussbaum, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Charles Taylor11 –
share with pragmatism the central insights about the therapeutic and
practical character of ethical reflection, understood as a work of the self
on the self with the goal of improving oneself and the condition one
finds oneself in. While only some of these thinkers engaged James’s
pragmatism directly (Diamond, Cavell, Nussbaum, Taylor), philosoph-

ical synergies with the others can be profitably drawn as well, even
without such first-hand acquaintance. In particular, pragmatist ethics
shares with Wittgensteinian moral philosophy the insistence on phil-
osophical therapy as the key methodological feature of an anti-theo-
retical and anti-foundational approach to moral reflection, of which
they questioned the attempt to codify and systematize the moral life,
while sharing with virtue ethics both the emphasis on self-cultivation
and the care of the self as the central register of the moral life, and the
concern for the peculiar self-transformation involved in one’s relation-
ship with morality itself. These authors, despite their different (and in
some cases almost opposite) philosophical sensibility and orientation,
variously share with James the refutation of the idea that the relation-
ship between moral reflection and the moral life should be of a founda-
tional kind (at a loss of moral rationality) or that ethics is just a part of a
wider philosophical system (at a loss of theoretical grounding). Against
the first desiderata they argue for a non-prescriptive, clarificatory and
transformative conception of moral reflection from within one’s ordi-
nary activities; against the second they envision an understanding of
ethics as one practice among others, having its own autonomy and yet
in dialogue with other aspects of our cultural mindedness and historical
worldliness. A study of the convergence of these different yet kindred
approaches would represent a progress in our comprehension of the
nature and stakes of moral reflection, as well as of the history of the
recent and contemporary debate on the possibility and advantage of a
post-foundational and post-systematic understanding of philosophical
ethics.
In lieu of a conclusion
The characterization of James’s moral thought here offered in its most

general contours does not exhaust its possibilities nor survey all its
details, but rather sketches, in my opinion, some central lines informing
it. My journey into his moral thought, rather than at completeness,
aimed in fact at presenting a key to unlock its wider theoretical and
methodological horizons. Many of the things I have tackled in this work
might well be more complicated than I have here depicted them, while
others I may have overcomplicated unnecessarily. But we all need to
compromise with complexity (of a problem or of an author) in order to
handle it profitably, resisting at once the temptation of trivializing it but
also trying our best not to be blown away by it. In the case of James’s
deep and extended reflection on moral philosophy this equilibrium is

very tricky to attain, and in critically discussing some of the readings
offered by other scholars I might well have trespassed over the threshold
of productive intelligibility. However, as I announced at the outset, my
understanding and presentation of James is motivated by the struggle
to square what I take to be some overlooked features of his work with
exigencies internal to my own moral and philosophical thinking, about
how to best depict the tasks and limitations of a critical philosophical
inquiry into the moral life. Thus, in the end, it is hard to tell which of
the difficulties presented here are due to James and which are due to me.
But, all in all, I take this to be an issue we all have to come to terms with,
to some degree, in one’s evaluations of any piece of work.
R. G. Collingwood describes this condition as the very essence of philo-
sophical writing. In his seminal Essay on Philosophical Method, pondering
philosophical style and its literary pitches, Collingwood claims that:
Every piece of philosophical writing is primarily addressed by the writer

to himself. Its purpose is not to select from among his thoughts those
of which he is certain and to express those, but the very opposite: to
fasten upon the difficulties and obscurities in which he finds himself
involved, and try, if not to resolve or remove them, at least to under-
stand them better ... The prose-writer’s art is an art that must conceal
itself and produce not a jewel that is looked at for its own beauty but a
crystal in whose depth the thought can be seen without distortion or
confusion; and the philosophical writer in especial follows the trade
of not the jeweler but of the lens-grinder. (1933: 209–14)
Collingwood is here voicing an idea with a noble pedigree and of indu-

bitable charm – an idea I took to heart and tried to exemplify the best I
could in my own interpretation of James, as well as in voicing my unre-
solved thoughts which animated it.
If read as an articulated defense of a moral theory, James’s ethics
might appear as rather unsatisfying, and its detractors justified in their
powerful criticisms. However, if this work has at least partially achieved
its ambition of challenging the grounds of such a reading, then the
project of shaping moral reflection along foundational lines will lose
part of its charm, thus opening up a more imaginative reading of James’s
moral thought. On closer inspection, James’s moral essays – with his
other writings acting as corollaries – convey a compelling conception
of moral reflection whose greatest value consists in its capacity to shed
light on the varieties of experiences and considerations surrounding and
informing our moral life. Their point, rather than telling what ethics is
or prescribing what is should be, is to show how to grasp, transform, and
live with it. I take his form of philosophical midwifery of a pragmatist
variety to be James’s lasting contribution to ethics as a, and on the, moral
philosopher. A lesson yet to be fully understood, profitably absorbed,
and actively put to work.
Notes
Introduction: William James, the Moral Philosopher

1. “Edward Hopper: Office in a Small City” (53. 183). In Helibrunn Timeline of Art
History, New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000–.
2. See e.g. Levin 2007; and Wells 2007.
3. An incomplete list is Hollinger 1981; Barzun 1983; Cotkin 1994; Croce 1995;
and Menand 2001. Obviously, James’s biographies are also full of sociolog-
ical details: see, in particular, Feinstein 1984; Simon 1998; and Richardson
2006.
1 Pragmatism, Therapy, and the Moral Life

1. In James we do not find thematized any substantive difference between
“ethics” and “morality”. However, I shall emphasize the reflective dimension
of “ethics” as against the ordinary one of “morality” as I find it at work in
(most of) his writings.
2. In this respect, the present work aspires to be an entry in Geistesgeschichte: in
reconstructing James I aim in fact at reconstructing a somewhat neglected
philosophical line (and canon) which he emphatically voiced and whose
restatement would in my opinion constitute a valuable service to our contem-
porary philosophical and cultural debate.
3. An informative work on James’s characteristic style and rhetoric is Stroud
2012. I have tackled some of these themes myself in Marchetti 2014.
4. For a compelling depiction of the situated character of James’s essays and
addresses, see Hollinger 1981.
5. See for example Bird 1986; Myers 1986; Putnam 1995; and Schwartz 2012.
6. For a survey, see Cobb-Stevens 1974; Sprigge 1993; Goodman 2002; and
Madelrieux 2012.
7. This does not open the doors of pragmatism to any author that self-pro-
claimed to be such, since it is my hermeneutical proposal to consider philo-
sophical traditions as defined by a very complex but far from loose blend of
criteria including judgments by fellow peers, historical conditions and even
accidental disguises. My historiographical model in such issues is the work of
Richard Bernstein, and in particular his manifesto Bernstein 1995. See also
Hollinger 1995; and Westbrook 2008.
8. Such path has been scarcely taken with the orderliness I will commit to in this
work, even if a restricted group of authors did not fail to appreciate it. Here I
have in mind Bernstein 1977, 2010; Cormier 2001; Goodman 1990 and 2002;
Koopman 2009 and forthcoming; H. Putnam 2004; R. A. Putnam 1990; and
Seigfried 1990.
9. The distinction between form and content, between method and substan-
tive work, implicitly at work in the two strategies should not be read in
265
266 Notes
dichotomic terms since both approaches, despite their diverse orientation,

share at least some materials and presuppositions. That is, one can say that
a certain still appealing method of tackling problems is what allow us to
recognize the problems that James was grappling with as still gripping; or,
conversely, that the problems he was engaging with are still with us because
the strategies to address the perplexities they generate have not changed.
Despite finding the emphasis on method over content more congenial and
productive, in the book I keep alive both strategies, which I explore in dialec-
tical terms showing their respective strengths and weaknesses.
10. The best references and guides are here Bordogna 2008; and Carrette 2013.
11. For an overview of such aspects of James’s thought see respectively Slater
2009; and Roth 1965. The orthodox account of James’s metaphysics and
philosophy of religion, see Lamberth 1999.
12. Gale 1999 depicted in an imaginative and powerful way how both tenden-
cies, that of the “promethean pragmatist” and that of the “anti-promethean
mystic,” can be detected in James.
13. For a survey of the relationship between Emerson and James on this point,
see Carpenter 1939; Cotkin 1986; Girel 2004; and Albrecht 2012 (Ch. 1). On
the presence of this register in Emerson’s own ethical texts, see Robinson
1993; and Van Cromphout 1999. For a wider compared presentation of both
the transcendentalist and pragmatist conception of the transformative char-
acter of philosophical work, see Goodman 1990, with ample references to
Cavell’s own pioneering work on such issues.
14. For a telling reading of the convergences of these authors on such themes,
see Donatelli, Frega and Laugier 2010.
15. It is an open question in the literature on pragmatism if such characteriza-
tion of pragmatism as a “method only” is itself neutral or whether it carries
with it a more substantive hidden philosophical agenda. Although I cannot
enter in this thorny issue here, I read James’s peculiar version of pragmatism
as at once neutral (in the sense of being non-substantive) and yet informed
by a number of features and emphases (on activities and practices) expressing
what we might call its overall philosophical motif.
16. This is for example the reading that has been offered by the logical positiv-
ists, who variously appreciated James’s pragmatic maxim and made it the
centerpiece of the principle of verification lying and the heart of their philo-
sophical project. For a reconstruction of James’s fortune in Vienna, see Ferrari
2010; and Poggi 2001.
17. James attracted some criticism for betraying the open-ended character of
his earlier material and ruminations when contrasted with the metaphysical
outlook (and content) of his later work. Rorty (2004) championed this kind
of criticism of James, denouncing a structural clash in his work between
metaphilosophical openness and metaphysical closure. While granting a
tension in James’s work between these two pulls (acknowledged by James
himself, especially in his private correspondence, and beautifully rendered
by Gavin 2013) I don’t think that its complexity can be best conveyed by
a crude periodization of his thought into early and late, as for example
Pragmatism – without doubt a later work – is the best expression and theori-
zation of pragmatism as an open method as against metaphysical closure and
Notes 267
definiteness. Also, I read this tension as a productive one, which can best be
understood when framed in the context of James’s own struggle with what we
might call a metaphilosophical reworking of philosophy (and of the Western
philosophical tradition as a whole) from the inside: sometimes the ruptures
and changes of directions James wanted to convey looked and sounded too
much like the very traditional philosophy he was fighting back – ethics being
an extremely interesting instance of this wider methodological battle.
18. That philosophical problems are perennial might sound as a too-grandeur
claim when made by a pragmatist, as James was precisely interested in
surveying the emergence, handling, and shifting in meaning and use of the
problems of human beings denying them any fixed nature and shape. And
yet I read in his metaphilosophical reflection the acknowledgment of a persist-
ency of certain human attitudes and orientations generating what might be
called the “general problems” of human beings as beings of a certain kind
and with certain histories. This is what, for example, makes us still appreciate
Greek epic poems and tragedies or medieval riddles, although not without an
effort of imagination, interpretation, and knowledge.
19. For a critique of the wider project informing this distinction from (what is
itself presented as) a pragmatist viewpoint, see Rorty 1982a (esp. xvii–xxi,
xxix–xxxvi) and 1982b.
20. James Conant, contra Rorty, reads James as an author moved by the convic-
tion that “the urge to ask philosophical questions and to yearn for answers
to them constitutes fundamental aspects of what it is to be human ... .
Philosophical questions, as often as not, are ones we do not feel able to
ignore. We can, of course, leave them unresolved – and often do – but they
continue to haunt us” (Conant 1997: 204).
21. The issue of James’s awareness of such fluidity is open to discussion, as we
find in James both a deeply historicist sensibility about the transitional
character of human nature and its problems, and a more traditional under-
standing of philosophical troubles as featuring enduring dynamics. James in
fact presented his diagnoses and therapies as always perspectival and provi-
sional, and yet aspired to display some very general dialectic in play in each
of their occurrence and deployment.
22. The twist associated with the professionalization of the American intellectual
life is well depicted by Wilson 1990; and Campbell 2006.
23. For a compelling discussion of the problematic character of such reduction,
see Conant 2001. For a non-reductionist reading of James, see Gunnarsson
2010; and Del Castillo 2012.
2 Questioning Moral Theory and the Shape of Ethics

1. These heterodox readers include Roth 1965; Edel 1976; Putnam 2004;
Franzese 2008; Cormier 2011; Pihlstrom 2013; and Koopman forthcoming.
2. The orthodox camp list Perry 1947; Madden 1979; Suckiel 1982 and 1996;
Boyle 1998; Bird 1997; Gale 1999; Cooper 2003; and Lekan 2003.
3. See for example Brennan 1961; Myers 1986; O’Connell 1992; Gale 1999; and
Cooper 2002.
268 Notes
4. Perry 1935; Suckiel 1982; and Lekan 2007 use this expression or a close
variation.
5. For example Bird 1997; Boyle 1998; Gale 1999; and Cooper 2003.
6. A recent example of this kind of debate between consequentialist and deon-
tological readings of James’s essay is the special issue of William James Studies
(Hester 2011), dedicated to James’s moral philosophy. The issue generated a
few responses to date: Lekan 2012; and Uffelman 2012.
7. Brennan 1961; Kloppenberg 1986; R. A. Putnam 1990; and Schrader 1998.
8. Madden 1979; Suckiel 1982 and 1996; Boyle 1998; and Gale 1999. Gale is
the author who explored at most length such co-presence and the diffi-
culty it generates for a reading of James’s moral thought as a consistent
ensemble.
9. Ruth Anna Putnam’s case is a particularly thorny one, since while at times
she seems to party with the foundational readings (as in Putnam 2011) – if
only by taking issues with them over some particulars of their interpreta-
tion – in other texts she delineates an alternative take on James’s ethics in
which the notion of a moral theory is not even considered, far less its conse-
quentialist rather than deontological character (as in Putnam 1998).
10. Henry James thematized this very issue from the point of view of the novelist
in his masterpiece “The Art of Fiction” (James 1984). The bibliography on the
relationship between literature and philosophy is vast and complex; on the
overlapping of philosophy and literature in the James brothers, see Hocks
1974, 1997; Posnock 1991; and Lapoujade 2008.
11. Compare the seminal work on Dewey’s ethics by Fesmire (2003) and Pappas
(2008), as well as the new wave of pragmatist ethics by LaFollette (2000) and
Wallace (2009).
12. On this point, see Lentricchia 1988 (Ch. 2); and Rorty 2007. For a wider study
of the sources of pragmatism as a literary movement, see Grimstad 2013 (esp.
Ch. 1).
13. It is an interpretative open question if this agenda is a positive one (as often
remarked), or rather only a critical one (as I shall defend).
14. Unless otherwise specified, all references in this chapter are to “Moral
Philosopher.”
15. For a similar reading of James’s uses of Darwin, see Richards 1982. James’s
ambivalent opinion of Darwinism is under certain aspects similar to the one
that, almost 50 years later, Wittgenstein had of Freudian psychoanalysis:
criticized if understood as a exhaustive scientific theory of the mind’s inner
workings while praised as a functional philosophical header through which
looking at some phenomena in a novel light.
16. Both Bernstein (2010) and Talisse and Hester (2004) are sensitive to this theme.
17. The expression is borrowed from McDowell (1981), who uses it for indicating
the temptation, in philosophy, of occupying a standpoint outside human
activities from which to assess them.
18. See Brennan 1961; Roth 1965; Gale 1999; Cooper 2002; and Lekan 2012.
19. Such thoughts experiments have been compared with the (most famous)
populating Wittgenstein’s Investigations; see for example Bird 1997; and
Cormier 2011.
20. For a different, resourceful analysis and resolution of such tension, see Misak
2013: 71–6.
Notes 269
21. It is important to keep in mind how James lists divine axiological orders
that we do not actively endorse de facto, but rather only passively assume de
jure, as another example of this sort of such alienating superstitious views.
This will be important for a sound understanding of the very last section
of “Moral Philosopher,” which many commentators read as a gateway to
religious ethics – an option that however here James clearly to be refuting if
not properly characterized not as a theory of abstract value but rather as a
conception of how to possibly understand and describe our concrete attribu-
tions of value.
22. Compare with what James calls the “fallacy of ex post facto prophecy” in
“[Notes on Ethics I] 1878–1885 #4472” (MEN: 300).
23. James makes a similar point in “[Notes on Ethics II] 1888–1889 #4428] (MEN:
306–7).
24. The formulation of this principle has generated a multitude of interpreta-
tions regarding the alleged clash between quantitative vs. qualitative consid-
erations at play in James’s ethical solution. For a discussion, see for example
Boyle 1998; Cooper 2003; and Welchman 2006.
25. In the light of this heterodox interpretation of James’s essay, I do not much
deem the orthodox reading on “Moral Philosopher” as advancing a moral
theory wrong as much as unfocused: the attempts to square what James
claimed in the essay are very useful and indeed raise many interesting ques-
tions, and yet in attacking James for having subscribed a certain view or prin-
ciple rather than another – or more incompatible ones at the same time – can
be said to be missing their critical target altogether.
26. The intricate relationship between ethics, metaphysics, and the religious atti-
tude in James has been at the center of Pihlström’s research. See in particular
Pihlström 2008 and 2009. For a classical statement, see Levinson 1981.
27. See, in particular “The Will to Believe” (in WB); “Introduction to The Literary
Remains of the Late Henry James” (in ERM); “Faith [I] 1895–1903 #4475” and
“Faith [II] 1899–1901 #4476” (in MEN). Madelrieux (forthcoming) convinc-
ingly argues for an “atheist” interpretation of James’s “The Will to Believe,”
thus countering the orthodoxy which read in it the defence of a voluntaristic
conception of belief formation at the basis of James’s “religious” ethics.
3 The Life of the Mind and the Practices of the Self

1. See for example Gale 1999; and Cooper 2003.
2. For a congenial sketch, see Parker 1999; and Simon 2010.
3. Virtue ethics, both ancient (Aristotelian) and modern (Humean), being the
obvious reference, the concern for the care of the self as the chief ethical
goal has also been argued along different lines by the philosophical tradition
of spiritual exercises (Hadot 1995) as well as by moral perfectionism (Cavell
2004).
4. See Wilshire 1979; Edie 1987; and Myers 1986.
5. Albrecht 2012: 178.
6. For a detailed study of James’s psychology and of its dialogues with the
studies and culture of the time, see Bordogna 2008; Bjork 1983 and 1988;
Croce 1995; Madelrieux 2008; and Wilson 1987.
270 Notes
7. On James’s systematic disciplines trespassing, see Croce 2012.

8. This is what attracted Wittgenstein to PP in the first place. Wittgenstein was
a very attentive reader of James, whose writings he kept engaging for years,
and despite he criticized aspects of the book (e.g. the occasional confla-
tion of the experience of words with their meaning and role in language,
or the emphasis on first-hand reports over grammatical considerations),
Wittgenstein praised PP’s anti-reductionist vocation. Wittgenstein was in
fact interested in showing the sui generis character of James’s reflections,
as they clearly do not square with the format of scientific remarks and
inquiries. On the complexities of this fascinating intellectual liaison, see
Goodman 2002.
9. I have tackled this connection at some depth in Marchetti forthcoming-a.
10. As Dewey tellingly remarked, without doubt under the influence of James,
“Mind is primarily a verb. It denotes all the ways in which we deal consciously
and expressly with the situation in which we find ourselves” (Dewey 1934:
274–5)
11. See in particular Edie 1987; and Wilshire 1979 and 1997.
12. For a survey of James’s “narrative of habit” that takes in serious consideration
its ethical aspect, see Tursi 1999.
13. On the relationship between James and Peirce on this point, see Hookway
1997.
14. For this aspect, see Brennan 1961 (esp. ch. 3).
15. For a related point, see Lekan 2007.
16. James discusses their respective positions in “Bain and Renouvier” (in ECR)
and in “The Feeling of Effort” (in EPs). For an overview of the ideo-motor
theory of action, see Stock and Stock 2004.
17. I am borrowing this terminology from McDowell (1979), who offers a similar
critique of the cognitive/conative divide informing British empiricism and
rationalism alike although from an Aristotelean point of view.
18. See previous note.
19. For a reading on Dewey’s conception of action along similar lines, see
Goodman 2007.
4 Truth, Experience, and the World Re-Enchanted

1. For a survey of the orthodox interpretation of James’s pragmatic conception
of truth, see Olin 1992; and Bauerlein 2010. For a reading of James’s reflection
on truth mindful of its ethical stakes, see Seigfried 1990 (chapters 10 and 11);
Allen 1993 (chapter 4); Cormier 2001; Calcaterra 2008; and Medina 2010.
2. Cormier (2001: 19, 143) builds a Millian-Wittgensteinian argument akin to
the one I shall sketch in the following pages, according to which for James
normativity should be seen as the outcome of a progressive critique, trans-
formation, and possible amelioration of one’s actual practices rather than as
the search for an extra-empirical foundation of our criteria of judgment and
conduct. This perfectionist line of argument is indebted to Cavell’s writings on
moral perfectionism (Cavell 1989 and 2004), and in particular to his reading
of Mill’s On Liberty – on which see Donatelli 2006, who explicitly addresses
the perfectionist dimension of truth-talking in Mill after Wittgenstein after
Notes 271
Cavell. A variation of this argument can be appreciated at work in Conant

1997 as well, although in the context of James’s strategy for the affirmation
of the pragmatic attitude itself.
3. In this I follow Cormier 2001; and Medina 2010.
4. Francesca Bordogna (2008: ch. 4) makes a powerful and convincing argu-
ment about the wider point and reaches of James’s pragmatic conception of
truth, claiming how in such discussion it was not only the nature of truth
but the very status of philosophical activity that was at stake – an issue raging
at the time and yet still very much alive in our cultural debate, which would
also explain the fierce opposition James encountered since he first formu-
lated his views.
5. See for example Moore 1907; and Russell 1910a and 1910b.
6. See for example Poggi 2001; and Ferrari 2010.
7. See for example Sandbothe 2004 (building on Rorty 1967 and 1982).
8. See for example the dialectical reconstructions in Rorty 1991 and 1998; and
Price 2010.
9. Just to name a few titles of a voluminous body of work, see Giuffrida and
Madden 1975; Haack 1976 and 1984; Thayer 1977, 1980, and 1983; Ford
1980; Moser 1983; Bybee 1984; Chisholm 1992; H. Putnam 1997 and 2005;
Sprigge 1997; Wilshire 1997; Jackman 1998; Gale 1999; Lamberth 1999 and
2005; Weed 2008; and Kitcher 2012.
10. See Rorty 1991; Ben-Menahem 1995; Conant 1997; Cormier 2001; and
Medina 2010. Putnam’s reading (esp. 1997 and 2005) sits across the orthodox
and the heterodox interpretation, as while he reads in James the defense
of a full fledged theory of truth (or, better, of truths in the plural), still he
acknowledges James’s repeated resistance to give a “definition of truth” of a
kind his detractors wanted him to have –that is, the attempt to “give a neces-
sary and sufficient condition for truth” (Putnam 1997: 171). Thus, according
to Putnam, one can have a theory of truth without being forced to spell out
its details by means of definitions.
11. A general, related point about the relationship between philosophical
pictures/elucidations and philosophical arguments/theories can be found
in Conant 1994 (esp. xi–xiv and xlvi–lvii). Conant there discusses Putnam’s
transformation in metaphilosophical sensibility – as well as his inheritance
of both pragmatism and Wittgenstein in this regard.
12. In the article Conant refers to the Cavellian idea of moral perfectionism (and
in particular to the idea of a higher self as a the proper addressee of the prag-
matist appeals) in presenting James’s “solution.”
13. In partial disagreement with Conant, I don’t read James’s early efforts to reply
to Royce as an attempt to build a consistent theory of truth, but rather as (less
self-conscious, if you will) experiments to articulate the pragmatist outlook
and possibly inculcate its seeds in its opponent. James in fact hardly ever, not
even in private correspondence, understood and described his attempt as a
theoretical definition of truth. Only in two occasions James speaks of a prag-
matic “theory” of truth, but always in reference to the way others have been
reading what he was doing (P: 32–3 and 37). I shall comment those passages
below.
14. Note how here James is contrasting the pragmatist outlook with the ration-
alist one, and yet a similar contrast could be made between the pragmatist and
272 Notes
the classical empiricist one. Despite James sees pragmatism as a radical form
of empiricism both at a methodological and gnoseological level, and as such
as a fellow traveller to be rescued from its own flow in order to be recruited in
the campaign against rationalism, still in shifting the (metaphilosophical and
theoretical) focus from mere sensitivities and brute sense-data to action and
practices pragmatism parts in significant ways from classical empiricism, which
James arrives at denouncing as yet another form of intellectualism because of its
abstraction – this time, by way of a reductionist analysis – from the ordinary.
15. The reference is to Dewey’s early ethical essays before 1905 (when the article
originally appeared in the Journal of Philosophy). Most of them are collected
in Dewey 1998.
16. Here I have in mind “Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism” (in PU).
For an examination of Bergson’s views see also his “Bradley or Bergson?,” in
EPh, and “Concept and Percept” (in SPP). On this intellectual exchange, see
Madelrieux 2011.
17. On Bergson’s interpretation of P and ERE, see Marchetti 2012.
18. The main spokesman of this interpretative line is Gale 1999.
19. See for example the reply to what James lists as the second misunderstanding
of the pragmatist conception of truth (MT: 101–2).
20. See P: 109–110. It is noteworthy how James relates once again the rational-
istic understanding of truth to the sentimentalist’s, accusing both of the very
same fallacious thinking.
21. Both Myers (1983) and Putnam (1997a) stressed the pedagogic register of the
essays.
22. A rich phenomenology of blindness has been sketched by Lachs 2008. See also
Leary 2008 and Ruf 2008 for a critical assessment of this reconstruction.
23. James suggested to imaginatively include non-human animals and the
environment in the range of our moral concerns. On James’s concerns for
non-human animals, see Albrecht 2004; for his environmental concerns, see
Stephens 2009.
24. Seigfried 1999: 92.
25. Putnam 1997a: 292–3.
26. On James on pluralism, see Bernstein 1977 and 2010; Goodman 2008 and
2012; and O’Shea 2000.
5 Ethical Conduct and Political Activity

1. See for example Otto 1943; West 1989; and Diggins 1994.
2. See for example Kloppenberg 1986; Lentricchia 1988; and Cotkin 1994.
3. See for example Livingston 1994; Coon 1996; Miller 1997; Smith 2004; and
Westbrook 2005.
4. See for example Koopman 2005; Ferguson 2007; Medina 2010; Livingston
2010; Goldman 2012; and Livingston 2013.
5. See for example Koopman 2009 (ch. 6) for a congenial discussion of how
a Jamesian (Deweyan) approach to political philosophy could advance a
progressivist agenda breaking the duopoly of liberalism and communitarism.
6. Quoted in Richardson 2006: 459. For an exhaustive commentary, see Albrecht
2012 (ch.3).
Notes 273
7. On James’s pragmatist refusal of both classical liberalism and the theory of

the social contract, see also Coon 1996; and Ferguson 2007.
8. Most famously advanced by Otto 1943; Garrison and Madden 1977 (on
which see Campbell 1981); and more recently by West 1989; and Diggins
1994 (on which see Smith 2004).
9. This discourse is intertwined with the clash between so called top-down and
bottom-up approaches to social-political issues. James’s variety of pragmatist
meliorism can in fact be read as a critique of those approaches trying to rule
the contingencies of our associated lives from the above of their contingen-
cies by means of intellectualistic theories preaching abstract policies of social
engineering. For a discussion, see Koopman 2009: ch. 6; Seigfried 1996: ch.
10; and West 1995.
10. This theme runs deep in the dialectic of James’s perhaps most well known
piece “The Will to Believe,” where what is tackled is, among other things,
the idea that those of believing and of willing are intertwined empowering
attitudes defining our mindedness as well as our worldliness, and the over-
looking of such feature of our practical nature – motivated by a represen-
tationalist picture of our subjectivity– often bring the apathy and idleness
featuring much of our personal and collective life. For a kindred reading, see
for example Welchman 2006.
11. An overall reconstruction of James’s ample reflection (psychological, social,
and metaphysical) on individualism is Pawelski 2007.
12. It is important to remind that James lectured “Great Men and Their
Environment” at the Harvard Natural History Society, while its follow-up
“The Importance of Individuals,” originally targeted for the Atlantic Monthly,
was published in Open Court. This would explain the great use of the scien-
tific register informing the former, while the latter is most clearly philo-
sophical. I have tackled the relationship between the “scientific” and the
“philosophical” register in chapter two in the context of the ethical register
of James’s PP. As similar considerations apply here, I shall limit myself to
quickly rehearsal that line of argument.
13. Cotkin 1995 draws a compelling comparison between James’s and Rorty’s
projects of cultural politics.
14. For a brilliant account of this aspect of James’s moral epistemology, see
Posnock 2010.
15. For James’s discussion of exceptional mental states Taylor 1982; and
Madelrieux 2008 (Ch. 8–10).
16. Edmons (2011) recently charged James for advancing a mere “passive ethics of
tolerance” inadequate to effectively address radical diversity. While agreeing
that passive tolerance is not enough when facing the Deleuzian “encounter
beyond recognition,” I contend that in “On a Certain Blindness” and related
writings James was addressing precisely such cases, offering his pragmatism
as an alternative strategy critical to such passivity.
17. For a discussion of these themes, see Saito 2005; and Shusterman 1997
(Ch.3).
18. While applauding this imaginative reading of James’s conception of moral
effort and evil, I contest to Franzese is his unwillingness to connect this aspect
of James’s moral thought with therapeutic and transformative one elabo-
rated in “Moral Philosopher,” which he reads instead as a sheer refutation of
274 Notes
any reflective account of ethics. I in fact take the two sets of considerations
advances as working in tandem to problematize and challenge the philo-
sophical presumption and goal to find a stable foundation to ethics from
outside our moral practices so described.
19. For a comparison between Mill and James over ethical liberalism, see Stephens
forthcoming; and Marchetti forthcoming-b.
20. Other themes could have been selected in its place: on gender issues, see
for example Tarver 2008; on race issues, see for example Lawson and Koch
2004 (in which James’s timid contribution and commitment to such debate
is duly remarked); on participatory democracy, see for example Miller 1997.
Feminist philosophers have been among the liveliest critics of these themes.
See for example Seigfried 1989 and 1996. As I write this text a book on femi-
nist interpretations of William James is under preparation: see Tarver and
Sullivan forthcoming.
21. Among those who stressed the influence of the Civil War on James, see in
particular Cotkin 1994; Menand 2001; and Richardson 2006.
22. Jane Addams wrote on the moral equivalence of war (or rather on “the moral
substitutes for war,” to use her exact expression) even earlier than James,
slightly differing on both its diagnosis and its conclusions. For a reconstruc-
tion of the (few) similarities and (many) differences between Addams and
James, see Carroll and Fink 2007: xxvi–xxxiii.
23. Technological advancement, changes in military strategies, and the mutation
of diplomatic codes redesigned the very dynamics and thus the very concept
of war so much that if its causes can be confidently said to be remarkably
traditional, yet what it does mean to be actively involved in one has trans-
formed. Still, one might claim in favor of James, the kind of war he has
in mind shares a lot with the widespread sprouts of violence spreading in
our streets, schools, and theatres: the question and task of channeling those
extreme and mighty aspects of the self into morally sound activities and
away from brutal practices are still much alive and pressing.
24. In the essay James also mentions, if only briefly, economical and geopolitical
reasons for war. His focus is in fact on the moral anthropology of war rather
than on its collateral financial and administrative convenience, establishing
an order of importance we unfortunately cannot give for granted nor accept
any more also given the way in which the very nature and meaning of “the
battlefield” have changed in the past century and half.
25. James made a similar point in “What Makes a Life Significant,” although he
also voiced some reservation about the capacity of those very subjects to appre-
ciate and enjoy such heroic virtues and strenuous mood because of their lack
of the appropriate socio-economical conditions, thus indirectly taking in what
after Dewey would be become the standard criticism of James’s blind spot.
26. In this last remark we can appreciate all the promises and limits of James’s
critical analysis and program of reformation: if on the one hand his words
are melioristic in their empowering function precisely because they address
our moral individuality with the goal of shaking it from the very inside,
on the other they are perhaps (too) optimistic in their hope of overcoming
and overriding social-economical limitations by means of strokes of moral
heroism alone.
Notes 275
Conclusion: The Seeds of a Revolution in Moral Philosophy

1. For a different account (and exemplification) of practicing philosophy in a
pragmatist-Wittgensteinian mood, see Hutchinson and Read 2013.
2. Cormier draws extensively on Diamond’s (1991) reading of Wittgenstein,
and tries to show how James’s philosophy was equally pervaded by a “real-
istic spirit.”
3. For a connection, see Edwards 1985 – where the (narrative of the) pragma-
tism of reference is Rorty’s.
4. James’s teachings have also (and, perhaps most, prominently) survived in the
works of many intellectual non-philosophers and the deeds of many non-
intellectual laymen as well, and yet, given the metaphilosophical approach
and focus privileged in this work, I am here interested in rescuing his legacy
among his philosophy peers.
5. Ethics after Pragmatism: The Quiet Revolution in, and a Counter-History of,
Twentieth-Century Moral Philosophy, in progress.
6. Another attempt at showing the breadth of the term “analysis” is Beaney
2007. For a study of the productive dialogues and exchanges between such
traditions at the beginning of the century, see Baghramian and Marchetti
forthcoming.
7. Dewey wrote extensively about ethics, and it can be confidently said that,
similarly to James, virtually all that he wrote was moved by ethical scruples.
A most comprehensive presentation of his moral approach is Dewey 1983.
8. See respectively Perry 1926; Lewis 1946; and White 1981.
9. See in particular H. Putnam 1994, 2004; R. A. Putnam 1985, 1987, 1990,
1998a; Bernstein 2010, 2014; Rorty 1989, 2000; and Seigfried 1990, 1996.
Other extremely interesting authors working in the wake of pragmatism
include Moody-Adams 1997; Misak 2000; Kitcher 2011; LaFollette 2007;
Stout 2001; and Wallace 1996, 2009.
10. Murdoch 1999; Diamond: 1991; Cavell 2004; and McDowell 1996. It has
to be noticed how McDowell’s moral views can be said to be inspired by
Aristotle as much as by Wittgenstein, thus making him close to a virtue ethi-
cist himself – although of a very peculiar kind.
11. Baier 1985, 1995; Williams 1985, 1993; Nussbaum 1990, 2001; Taylor 1989,
1992; and MacIntyre 1981, 1988.
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Index
action, 70–71, 76, 111, 131–135, Cormier, Harvey, 163, 255, 265, 267,
139–141, 147–154, 179, 186–194, 268, 270, 271, 275
221, 229–236, 246, 250
agency, 113, 116, 124, 128, 137–138, Darwin, Charles, 51, 78, 85, 103, 223,
149, 178–179, 187, 189, 210 235, 268
Albrecht, James, 39, 121, 219, 266, deliberation, 71, 148, 151
269, 272 democracy, 200, 215, 216, 219–220,
anthropology, philosophical, 42, 109, 228, 240, 274
120–130, 151, 157, 235 Dewey, John, 31, 121, 157, 176, 216,
anti-theory, philosophical, 6, 48, 51, 219–220, 254, 260, 268, 270, 272,
81, 118, 169, 173, 259–261 274, 275
attention, 41, 124, 126, 129–135, Diamond, Cora, 261, 262, 275
140–156, 160, 181–182, 198–199, dogmatism, 19, 106, 200
202, 206, 210–211
edification, self-, 22, 32, 39, 109, 158,
Bain, Alexander, 125, 131–134, 147, 217, 225, 251
148, 270 education, self-, 32, 121, 134, 157, 199
belief, 130–131, 137–146 effort, 81, 133–136, 143, 146–147,
belief, religious, 21, 37, 112–114, 191 150–156, 202, 222, 225, 227, 231,
Bergson, Henri, 13, 179, 182, 272 235–236, 244
Bernstein, Richard J., 261, 265, 268, Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 26, 157, 228,
272, 275 230, 233, 237, 266
blindness, moral, 197–208, 244, 272 empiricism, 85–92, 123, 125, 131,
Brennan, Bernard P., 52, 180–182, 138–144, 164, 182, 212, 228, 234,
267–268, 270 237, 258, 270, 272
empiricism, radical, 43, 179–181, 211,
care of the self, 7, 39, 118–119, 227, 272
121–122, 128–130, 217, 231, 234, energy, moral, 36, 40, 100, 114, 133,
257, 259, 261–262, 269 151, 153, 229–241
Carlyle, Thomas, 141, 228, 230 evaluation, 80, 85, 88–94, 102–103,
casuistic question, 69–75, 82, 88–89, 142, 148, 160
93, 102–107, 116 exhortative ethics, 18, 21–25, 38,
Cavell, Stanley, 30, 261–262, 269–270, 44–51, 61–62, 75–77, 83, 93, 98,
275 102–105, 109–111, 117–124,
Conant, James, 169–173, 267, 270, 271 135–136, 158, 160, 179, 198,
conceptions, philosophical, 75, 77–79, 214, 217, 221, 238–239, 247–248,
82–84 251–253
conduct, 60–64, 75–79, 81–82, 121, experience, 8, 30, 76–93, 128–130,
128, 130–140, 142, 158, 161, 136–150, 206–213, 217–221, 227
183–184, 187–196, 199, 202, 205, experimentation, 23, 26, 30, 80–81,
210–211, 220, 224, 226–230, 241, 102, 121, 157, 178, 188, 217, 221,
244 227–230
289
290 Index
flourishing, human, 40, 61, 65, 122, normativity, 33, 60–61, 161, 191–201,
136, 137, 225, 229, 238, 245, 249, 207, 270
252, 260
Franzese, Sergio, 36, 40, 48, 56–57, objectivity, 100–101, 114, 170,
73–75, 120, 132, 234–236, 267, 273 186–187, 196
freedom, 37, 40, 114, 119–120,
124–125, 146, 212, 233, 237, 251, perfectionism, moral, 40, 50, 109,
284 120, 180, 217–218, 227, 233, 237,
fulfillment, moral, 27, 36, 40, 70 246, 260, 270, 271
Perry, Ralph Barton, 44–45, 49, 218,
Gale, Richard, 1, 36, 52, 112, 218–219, 260, 267, 268, 275
265, 266, 267, 268, 269, 271, 272 phenomenology, moral, 62, 65, 75,
Goodman, Russell B., 139, 265, 266, 80, 99, 142, 149, 151, 157, 272
270, 272 Pihlström, Sami, 253–255, 269,
growth, moral, 25–27, 31, 71, 121, 275
178, 183, 221–224 pluralism, 67, 71, 146, 192–194, 199,
206, 211–217, 232, 261
habit, 87–89, 106, 121, 124, 130–140, psychological question, 69, 73–75,
143, 147, 171, 231, 236, 241 82–93
hortatory ethics, see exhortative ethics psychology, philosophical, 118,
Hume, David, 141–142, 144, 269 121–137, 143, 146–147, 158, 235,
238
imagination, moral, 58, 59, 63, 83, Putnam, Hilary, 43, 58–60, 261, 265,
93, 95, 126, 197, 198, 199, 201–205, 271, 275
211, 227, 240, 241, 242, 250 Putnam, Ruth Anna, 43, 52, 209, 261,
individualism, 16, 39–42, 49, 92, 121, 268, 272, 275
200, 204, 213–239
intellectualism, 72–79, 99, 100, 107, rationalism, 123–125, 141, 164, 171,
140–141, 163, 172–175, 178–188, 189–192, 195
193–196, 206, 250 re-enchantment, 198–213
religion, ethics and, 16–21, 27, 34–37,
Kant, Immanuel, 44, 54, 128, 193, 235 41–45, 112–116, 269
Koopman, Colin, 40, 109, 124, 157, representationalism, 7, 119, 156,
216, 265, 267, 272, 273 160–162, 178, 188, 196, 210,
235
meliorism, 50, 102, 120–121, 182, romanticism, 198, 211–213, 227
193–194, 216, 219–224, 229–233, Royce, Josiah, 116, 169–173, 271
237, 244, 249, 252, 259–260, 273
metaphilosophy, 2–6, 17, 21–25, Seigfried, Charlene H., 2, 163, 200,
39–41, 50–52, 71, 118–119, 203, 261, 265, 270, 272, 273, 274,
163–174, 239, 248–256, 258, 260, 275
266–275 self-constitution, 22, 25, 40, 46,
metaphysical question, 69–75, 82–95, 119–122, 157, 221, 234, 257, 259,
100 262
metaphysics, ethics and, 20–21, 35, Sidgwick, Henry, 35, 148, 258
66, 266, 269 skepticism, moral, 67–68, 90, 96–98,
Mill, John Stuart, 35, 54, 125, 233, 102, 140
237, 246, 258, 270, 274 skepticism, philosophical, 171, 176,
moralism, 68, 76, 98, 102–107, 153, 250
252–259 Spencer, Herbert, 35, 54, 144, 223, 228
Index 291
subjectivity, 76, 82–83, 113, 116, Uffelman, Mark, 40, 120–121,

123–137, 156–162, 178, 183–199, 219–220, 268
221–227, 230, 231–238, 244
value, 49–51, 61–75, 92–98, 103–109,
therapy, philosophical, 14–15, 24–35, 125, 128, 133, 149, 161, 185, 186,
61–63, 69, 74–83, 92–98, 102–109, 190–197, 201, 210, 235, 241–242,
117–122, 129–130, 160–162, 169, 261–263
238–239, 248–264, 267, 273 virtue, 38, 143–136, 211, 232,
transformation, moral, 2, 14, 15, 243–244, 257–262, 269, 274
24–33, 40–41, 46, 57–61, 74, vision, moral, 32, 97, 100, 114, 125,
92, 98, 102, 105, 117–122, 141, 150–152, 197–202, 209, 234
150–158, 162, 195, 198–206,
213–219, 232–238, 243, 251–253, war, 239–345
270–273, 287 will, 136–138, 142–156
truth, 5, 7, 13, 27, 59, 69, 95, 99, 107, Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 13, 26, 233,
129, 152, 159–213, 236, 240 253–262, 268, 270, 271, 275

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Ethics and Philosophical Critique in William James

Ethics and Philosophical

Introduction: William James, the Moral Philosopher 1

1 Pragmatism, Therapy, and the Moral Life 9

2 Questioning Moral Theory and the Shape of Ethics 48

4 Truth, Experience, and the World Re-Enchanted 159

5 Ethical Conduct and Political Activity 214

Conclusion: The Seeds of a Revolution in Moral Philosophy 248

The naïve picture of academics as solitary figures silently composing

I have also accumulated a wealth of debts during many enlightening

this work. James is (and we are) looking at a moral philosopher through

exemplification, James addressed a particular cultural landscape while

Plan of the book

In Chapter 1 I frame James’s reconsideration of ethics in the wider context

with which he encourage us to confront and experiment with, chal-

and “The Importance of Individuals.” In these works James sketches a

The difficulty of reading James: a third way beyond

The challenge of reconstructing James’s reflection on ethics in a way

Since it is a fact that we still go back to James to address our prob-

profitable substantive philosophical views has been a well-trodden path.

sketch a possible picture of this situation that might be helpful to give a

about their various reconstructions of its unity. In particular, in partial

of a philosophical account of morality, and thus of the role and work of

of his insights on the nature of moral reflection, and consequently the

The theorizing mind tends always to the over-simplification of its

Other passages might be brought as evidence of the contiguity, but

opposed by a painstaking search for meaningful differences. In this direc-

moral philosophy and as a moral philosopher) of why ethics, the way

An alternative approach: hortatory ethics

As I have begun to argue, the present work offers an original reconstruc-

intention was precisely that of undermining any attempt to build a moral

however claiming any exhaustiveness, for reasons internal to the nature

In James’s writings there seems to be a peculiar concern for the form

The nature of philosophical work and its

My reconstruction of James’s work in moral philosophy will be conducted

good philosophical text should not offer us definitive solutions to the

In the first chapter of Pragmatism, in presenting his most well-known

The visual metaphor is often reprised by James in his writings. What

There can be no difference anywhere that doesn’t make a difference

If the chief teaching of pragmatism is that the meaning of a certain

it, James encourages us to pay attention to the variety of practical differ-

desiderata, which in their turn are left to others to be scrutinized under

things. If philosophical problems find their source in our difficulties

on the actors involved and the conditions in which they happen to

Cotkin himself registers a therapeutic intent in James’s philoso-

The public philosopher engaged philosophy as an act of edifica-

In order to appreciate the recurrence of such constitutive features of

It is interesting to notice how, when approaching his moral writings,

claimed, lived and actively endorsed. In James’s writings, the refutation

a discipline subordinated to religion or metaphysics, emancipating in

A shift in the nature and meaning of ethics: James’s

In James’s writings we find thus an overall renegotiation of the very

(Lekan 2007); and an “ethics of freedom” (Roth 1965), just to name a

This book focuses attention on James’s moral philosophy by

Roth’s selection of texts and themes is particularly interesting since it

unity beyond such a multiplicity of texts, so as to gage its characteristic

Such injunction voices an admonition to our inveterate tendency of

universe in its constitutive elements. The upshot of this project would

A brief survey of the articulation of James’s moral writings

In the investigation of James’s philosophical reflection on ethics, besides

to do with the attention, perceptive and emotional, with those aspects

A last concern about reading James: philosophy,

Connected with the difficulty of finding an harmonic moral tune in

The presence of such latent tension in his writings seems at the