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Pragmatism and Social
Philosophy
This book explores the role that American pragmatism played in the
development of social philosophy in 20th-century Europe.
The essays in the first part of the book show how the ideas of Peirce,
James, and Dewey influenced the traditions of European philosophy,
especially existentialism and the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory,
that emerged in the 20th century. The second part of the volume deals
with current challenges in social philosophy. The essays here demonstrate
how discussions of two core issues in social philosophy – the conception
of social conflict and the public – can be enriched with pragmatist
resources. In featuring both historical and conceptual perspectives, these
essays provide a full picture of pragmatism’s role in the development of
Continental social philosophy.
Pragmatism and Social Philosophy will be of interest to scholars and
advanced students working on American philosophy, social philosophy,
and Continental philosophy.
Michael G. Festl is a professor of philosophy at the University of St. Gallen.

Michael has been a guest researcher in Salzburg, Chicago, and Melbourne.
He wrote a book on justice and edited a handbook on pragmatism. He
lives with his wife and his four children near Lake Constance.
Routledge Studies in American Philosophy
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Joshua Forstenzer
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Pragmatism and Social Philosophy

Exploring a Stream of Ideas from America to Europe
Edited by Michael G. Festl
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Pragmatism and Social
Philosophy
Exploring a Stream of Ideas from
America to Europe
Edited by Michael G. Festl

First published 2021
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Festl, Michael G., editor.
Title: Pragmatism and social philosophy : exploring a stream of ideas from
America to Europe / edited by Michael G. Festl.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2021. | Series: Routledge studies
in American philosophy | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020037299 (print) | LCCN 2020037300 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780367486792 (hardback) | ISBN 9781003044369 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Pragmatism. | Social sciences—Philosophy.
Classification: LCC B832 .P5645 2021 (print) | LCC B832 (ebook) |
DDC 300.1—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037299
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020037300
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Contents
1 Pragmatism’s Social Philosophy: New Tiles and New Currents 1

M I C H A E L G . FE STL
PART A
Pragmatism and the Birth of Social Philosophy 7
I
Pragmatism and European Philosophy 9
2 Paul Carus and Pragmatism: A European Philosopher in

America 11
J A M E S CA M P B E L L
3 An Ethics of Exemplarity: Emerson in Germany and the

Existentialist Tradition 31
D E N N I S S Ö L CH
4 “To Make Us Think, in French, Things Which Were

Very New”: Jean Wahl and American Philosophy 49
M O R I TZ G A N SE N
II
Pragmatism and European Sociology 69
5 Pragmatism and Sociology: The French Debate 71

C L AU D E G AU TIE R A N D E MMAN UE L RE N AULT
6 From Pragmatic Maxim to Habit: A Theoretical and

Methodological Framework Through Peirce and Bourdieu 86
S I M O N E B E R N ARDI DE L L A RO SA
vi Contents
7 Florian Znaniecki and American Pragmatism: Mutual
Inspirations 103
AG N I E S Z K A H E N SO L DT
III
Pragmatism Loved and Hated: The Case of the
Frankfurt School 123
8 American Pragmatism, Sociology of Knowledge, and

the Early Frankfurt School 125
K E N N E TH W. STIKKE RS
9 American Pragmatism and Frankfurt School Critical

Theory: A Family Drama 145
A RV I SÄ R K E L Ä
10 Dewey, Ebbinghaus, and the Frankfurt School: A Controversy

Over Kant Neither Fought Out nor Exhausted 163
C E D R I C B R AUN
PART B
The Relevance of Pragmatism for Social Philosophy 181
IV
Pragmatism and Conflict 183
11 Racism, Colonialism, and the Crisis of Democracy: The

Contributions of W.E.B. Du Bois 185
S H A N N O N S U L L IVA N
12 Dynamics of Interaction: What Pragmatism Can Teach

Us About Social Conflicts and Their Escalation 200
L OTTA M AY E R
13 Addams and Gilman: The Foundations of Pragmatism,

Feminism, and Social Philosophy 218
N Ú R I A SA R A MIRA S B O RO N AT
Contents vii
V
Pragmatism and the Public 235
14 Recent Problems of the Public 237

H E N R I K RY DE N FE LT
15 The Affective Side of Political Identities: Pragmatism,

Populism, and European Social Theory 248
M ATTE O SA N TARE L L I A N D JUSTO SE RRAN O Z AMOR A
16 John Dewey’s Economics: A Liberal Critique of

Ordoliberalism 265
C H R I S TO P H ER GO H L
List of Contributors 287

Index 289
1 Pragmatism’s Social Philosophy
New Tiles and New Currents
Michael G. Festl
A number of gaps have recently been filled in the mosaic depicting the
history of pragmatism. This is especially true for the reception outside
the United States. We now know of a fruitful reception of pragmatism
in the Hispanic world (Pappas, 2011). We know that there have been
“Cambridge Pragmatists”, Cambridge, England, notabene (Misak,
2016). Despite the mantra-like repeated ascription of pragmatism as the
quintessentially American philosophy, such studies lay bare that prag-
matism is anything but purely (Northern) American. It is not the gestalt
American exceptionalism (if that ever existed) has assumed on the field of
mind. Pragmatism is, and has been from the beginning, an international
philosophy that happened to emerge in America and was then developed
by engaging with a bustling and sprawling modernization, visible, most
of all, in cities like Chicago and New York but also in, say, London,
Paris, and Tokyo. Not only has pragmatism been conceived with tools
forged outside the US, as its founders highlighted; from its very begin-
ning, pragmatism has also been received with appreciation outside the US.
This flies in the face of a reading of pragmatism’s reception which assumes
that, especially in Europe, pragmatism had only been pulled to pieces,
an assumption strengthening the hypotheses of pragmatism as America’s
philosophical Sonderweg (separate path).
Nevertheless, plenty is yet to be done to get a fuller mosaic of pragma-
tism’s significance. This anthology attaches new tiles by focusing on prag-
matism’s past and present contributions to social philosophy in Europe,
especially France and Germany but also Poland, which, due to pragma-
tism’s studies on Polish immigrants in Chicago, has been an important
reference almost from the beginning. A normative discipline inquiring
how society ought to organize itself, social philosophy connects to eth-
ics and political philosophy. Yet, opposed to traditional conceptions of
especially ethics, it does not assume the existence of immutable values for
organizing society, values in need of discovery and application. Rather,
social philosophy holds that questions of value are connected to and
should be (tentatively) decided in exchange with social facts, relations,
2 Michael G. Festl
habits, and institutions. Hence, it stays in touch with the social sciences,
investigating the normative implications of the latter’s findings. Under-
stood this way, the discipline is a product of sociology’s detachment from
philosophy in the late 19th century; the German philosopher/sociologist
Georg Simmel (1858–1918) was the first to use the term Sozialphiloso-
phie in analytic fashion. Social philosophy is philosophy’s effort to stay
connected to sociology despite the latter’s emancipation into an auton-
omous discipline. So, if philosophy is an octopus whose flexible limbs
wriggle through the house of science, social philosophy is the limb that
embraces sociology.
In the mosaic of pragmatism’s significance, the part on social philoso-
phy is rather empty. Most tiles have been attached and are constantly
reattached in the part on pragmatism’s epistemology, especially on truth.
At the same time, pragmatism is congenial to social philosophy’s merging
of parts of philosophy with parts of sociology. Arguing for a seamless
connection between normative and empirical claims, pragmatism lends
credibility to this merger. This explains the appreciative reception of
pragmatism by Europe’s social philosophers, amply demonstrated in this
anthology. No hostility to pragmatism comparable to European hostil-
ity in epistemology or metaphysics is visible in social philosophy. To the
contrary, the emergence of social philosophy in Europe was profoundly
influenced by pragmatist ideas. It goes too far to speak of the birth of
social philosophy from the spirit of pragmatism but not much too far
either. How much too far exactly is, I believe, a fruitful question for fur-
ther research.
The anthology hosts nine chapters on pragmatism’s role in the forg-
ing of social philosophy, divided into three parts. The first part revolves
around pragmatism’s reception in European philosophy from around
the turn of the 20th century to the 1920s, the time social philosophy
emerged. It runs the gamut of assessments, from hostile to friendly. James
Campbell inquires the causes of the hostility with which pragmatism,
especially in William James’s version, was met by European thinkers.
To that end, he focuses on the critique of pragmatism by Paul Carus,
a German philosopher who migrated to the US and was essential for
the time’s world-wide reception of pragmatism (chapter 2). Dennis Sölch
takes a look at Germany’s earliest reception of Ralph Waldo Emerson as
a founding father of American pragmatism, laying bare affinities between
pragmatism and European philosophy. Friedrich Nietzsche, a central ref-
erence point for social philosophers, notably Theodor W. Adorno, fig-
ures as Emerson’s central German reader in Sölch’s account (chapter 3).
Moritz Gansen deals with French philosopher Jean Wahl’s appreciation
and dissemination of William James and other pragmatists. Today almost
forgotten, Wahl is instrumental in the relationship between pragmatism
and social philosophy since he shaped the former’s reception by some of
France’s most influential social philosophers (chapter 4).
Pragmatism’s Social Philosophy 3
The second part investigates pragmatism’s reception in European soci-
ology. Claude Gautier and Emmanuel Renault draw an exciting, U-shaped
curve of the value of pragmatism in French sociology: heavy trading at
the turn of the 20th century until about 1920; lack of demand between
the 1920s and the 1970s; and recovery in the 1980s, leading to two major
research projects on pragmatism still underway (chapter 5). Simone Ber-
nardi della Rosa uncovers affinities between Charles S. Peirce’s theory
of habit and Pierre Bourdieu’s account of habitus. He shows how the
notion of habit is crucial for undermining dichotomies and realizing the
pragmatic maxim that only our actions, not our confessions, are a true
guide to our values (chapter 6). Agnieszka Hensoldt focuses on the Polish
sociologist Florian Znaniecki. She not only illuminates Znaniecki’s direct
affiliations with pragmatism, especially The Polish Peasant in Europe and
America, coauthored with W.I. Thomas, but also takes a look at the late
Znaniecki’s shaping of sociology in Poland (chapter 7).
The third part is devoted to pragmatism’s relation to the foremost school
of social philosophy today: the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory. Ken-
neth W. Stikkers investigates pragmatism’s role in the emergence of social
constructivism in Europe through the work of Max Scheler and Wilhelm
Jerusalem. Thereby, Stikkers sheds light on the early Frankfurt School’s
reception of pragmatism, which was formed by Scheler’s encounter with
James’s work (chapter 8). Arvi Särkelä tracks the major events in the
Frankfurt School’s reception of pragmatism from the 1920s to today. He
explains that the Frankfurt School’s continuous interest in pragmatism,
from Horkheimer, Marcuse, and Adorno to Apel and Habermas to Hon-
neth and Jaeggi, has been sparked by commonalities between the two
schools, especially the ambition for social transformation (chapter 9).
Such commonalities are also important to Cedric Braun’s contribution.
Braun focuses on John Dewey’s German Philosophy and Politics and its
argument that Immanuel Kant’s dualistic philosophy opened the gates
to German militarism. He shows how Axel Honneth defends Dewey’s
account from the perspective of the Frankfurt School against German
advocates of Kant, tapping a novel source for researching the relationship
between pragmatism and the Frankfurt School (chapter 10).
After concentrating on the period from the 1890s to the 1930s, the
anthology jumps to pragmatism’s present impact on social philosophy in
Europe. The gap that thereby emerges testifies to pragmatism’s decline by
the middle of the 20th century. While recent research has demonstrated
that it is simplistic to speak of a general eclipse of pragmatism, this
anthology reveals that, concerning social philosophy, things do become
dark for pragmatism in those decades. However, it is beyond the reach of
this anthology to inquire the reasons. In any case, the situation is different
today. Pragmatism is up and running in European discussions of social
philosophy. So, in addition to attaching new tiles to the mosaic of prag-
matism’s history, this anthology stirs the flowing current of ideas from
4 Michael G. Festl
west to east, from America to Europe. Before James’s philosophy was
recognized in Europe, the only strong philosophical current connecting
Europe and America went the other way around, east to west. Support-
ing James’s wish that the philosophical current from west to east (which
he got going more or less single-handedly) will not run dry (James, 1985,
p. 2), the fourth and fifth parts depict pragmatism’s potentials for social
philosophy in Europe. Thereby, the anthology suggests that two of prag-
matism’s concepts are especially relevant today: conflict and the public.
Part four is devoted to pragmatism’s contribution to the concept of
conflict. Shannon Sullivan assesses appraisals of the outbreak of World
War I stated by Dewey, James, and W.E.B. Du Bois. She argues that only
Du Bois’s, with its emphasis on white supremacy, accounts for what went
wrong. On this basis, Sullivan shows why Du Bois’s work is important
in dealing with conflicts in Europe today, for example over migration
from Africa (chapter 11). Lotta Mayer demonstrates that the pragmatist
approach to crisis is unique because it is process oriented and dynamic.
Thereby, she reveals a major cause of pragmatism’s relevance to social phi-
losophy’s notion of conflict. Mayer develops the work of Herbert Blumer
to provide an action-centered account of the players in conflicts, includ-
ing wars (chapter 12). Núria Sara Miras Boronat highlights the common-
alities between pragmatism and feminism. Criticizing both for neglecting
classical women pragmatists, she shows that regaining this heritage, espe-
cially Jane Addams and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, is fertile for a theory
of power, domination, and oppression (chapter 13). These three contri-
butions demonstrate that fully exploiting pragmatist resources implies
looking beyond conventional pragmatists (Peirce, James, and Dewey) to
thinkers such as Du Bois (Sullivan), Blumer (Mayer), Addams, and Gil-
man (Miras Boronat).
Focusing on pragmatism’s notion of the public, part five almost natu-
rally centers around Dewey. Henrik Rydenfelt relies on Dewey to deal
with the challenges that communication technologies and pluralism pose
for political participation today. He releases pragmatism’s notion of the
public from the embrace of deliberative democracy developed by Ger-
man philosopher Jürgen Habermas, arguing that the strength of Dewey’s
account is freed only if used as experimental inquiry into social issues
(chapter 14). Matteo Santarelli and Justo Serrano Zamora invoke Dew-
ey’s theory of emotions to rethink the role of affections in the creation of
social demands and political identities. Underlining the power of pragma-
tism’s philosophy of the public, they criticize Italy’s national movement
and its banner “Italians First!” (chapter 15). Christopher Gohl turns to
Dewey’s economic thought as part of Dewey’s theory of the public and
compares it to ordo-liberalism, the account that relates capitalism and
democracy in Germany and increasingly also in the EU. Searching for
mutual inspiration, Gohl inquires commonalities and differences between
Dewey and ordo-liberalism, which its German defenders also label Soziale
Pragmatism’s Social Philosophy 5
Marktwirtschaft (social market economy) (chapter 16). These three
papers make a case for putting Dewey center stage in European social
philosophy.
The match between these chapters has been tested in a conference by
the John Dewey Center Switzerland in St. Gallen in June 2019. Federica
Gregoratto and I organized this conference, sponsored by the Research
Fund of the University of St. Gallen, the Philosophical Society of Eastern
Switzerland, and the Swiss Academy for the Humanities and the Social
Sciences. Generous support was provided by Dieter Thomä, chair of phi-
losophy at the University of St. Gallen. I also thank Barbara Jungclaus and
Thomas Telios for making the event work. My colleague Cedric Braun
provided crucial help in editing this anthology. Special thanks to Federica
Gregoratto for her invaluable ideas and tips and her guidance of this
project.
References
James, W. (1985). The Varieties of Religious Experience. Penguin Books.
Misak, C. (2016). Cambridge Pragmatism: From Peirce and James to Ramsey and
Wittgenstein. Oxford University Press.
Pappas, G. F. (Ed.). (2011). Pragmatism in the Americas. Fordham University
Press.
Part A
Pragmatism and the Birth

of Social Philosophy
I
Pragmatism and European
Philosophy
2 Paul Carus and Pragmatism
A European Philosopher in
America
James Campbell
Paul Carus was born into an educated religious family in Ilsenburg am

Harz, in present-day Sachsen-Anhalt, Germany, on 18 July 1852. He died
in LaSalle, Illinois, on 11 February 1919. He studied at the universities in
Greifswald, Strasbourg, and Tübingen, receiving his doctorate in classical
philology from Tübingen in 1876. After he served in the Prussian military
and taught briefly in a gymnasium and in the military academy in Dres-
den, his disillusionment with the autocracy of the Prussian state and its
state church caused him to abandon his plans to follow his father into
the ministry. He wanted the freedom to follow the light of reason and the
guidance of science. He departed for Belgium, England, and eventually
the United States, where he began teaching German in Boston and pur-
sued writing and editorial work. His little volume Monism and Meliorism
(1885) caught the attention of Edward Carl Hegeler. Hegeler was a suc-
cessful mining engineer born in Bremen and educated at the Bergakad-
emie in Freiberg in Sachsen, a cofounder of the Matthiessen and Hegeler
Zinc Works and the founder of the Open Court Publishing Company in
1887. Carus ran the publishing house from late 1887 to 1919, editing
both The Open Court and The Monist.1 From this lofty perch, Carus
was able to develop and disseminate his own philosophical perspective
in dozens of books and hundreds of articles. One of the central foci of
Carus’s later work was his rejection of pragmatism, and his hostility to it
was so strong that he gathered up a series of his antipragmatic writings
from 1909 through 1911 into the volume Truth on Trial (1911a).
Carus was thus an early European opponent of pragmatism living in
America and writing at a time critical for its interpretation on both sides
of the Atlantic. He maintained at the Third World Congress of Philosophy
in Heidelberg in1908 that “pragmatism does indeed come from America;
but, thank God, the movement has not yet conquered the entire country”.
He continues that it is “an illness that has resulted from the search to cre-
ate something new and completely original”. From his point of view, how-
ever, “what is true in pragmatism is not new; and what is new, is false”.2
In this chapter, I attempt to flesh out the meaning of this brief com-
ment by examining Carus’s extensive published writings on pragmatism.
12 James Campbell
In particular, I hope to indicate what a consideration of his thought can
tell us about the reception of the pragmatic movement, especially as it
was developed by William James.3 I also hope to show how understand-
ing Carus’s perspective can help us grasp the reaction of European critics
to pragmatism. While I believe that he was better informed than most
European commentators about pragmatism because of his American
location, I also believe that some of his emphases served to lead crit-
ics of pragmatism, both European and American, away from attempts
to explore James’s message. Further, I believe that this chapter shows
that Carus and James were frequently talking past one another, unable to
recognize that they were both attempting to deal, each in his own way,
with similar issues, especially with the loss of the centrality of religious
life. For James, religion, “occupying herself with personal destinies and
keeping thus in contact with the only absolute realities which we know,
must necessarily play an eternal part in human history”,4 and similarly
for Carus, “the God question is the touchstone of any system of thought”
(1904, p. 459).5
In 1909, Carus writes that James’s pragmatism is at present “as
broadly before the public as any system of thought” (1909d, p. 156).
He continues that pragmatism “has taken a strong hold upon the pres-
ent generation, but it remains to be hoped that this is more due to the
attractive personality of Professor James than to any intrinsic power in
its leading ideas” (1909a, p. 81). The year before, Carus had written that
pragmatism should be seen as an unfortunate intellectual craze, noting
that while it “comes with the pretense of being taken seriously”, in fact,
“it sweeps over the country with the power of a fashionable fad” (1908,
p. 360). Pragmatism, Carus continues, “appeared cometlike on our intel-
lectual horizon. It flashed up with a sudden fluorescence like a luminous
fog which through the extent of its broad sweep threatens to outshine
the old stars of a steadier light”, but he predicts that pragmatism “will
fade again after a while”. For him, “the nucleus of the comet is Professor
James”, whom he characterizes as “brilliant but erratic” (1908, p. 361).
He tells us further that he cannot “agree with or accept the philosophy of
the great Harvard Professor” and that he considers pragmatism’s wide-
spread acceptance to be “a symptom of the immaturity and naïveté that
obtains sometimes even in the professional circles of our universities”.
While Carus reaffirms his “unbounded admiration” for James’s “extraor-
dinary and fine personality”, he maintains that it would be undesirable if
James’s pragmatism “would ever exercise a determining and permanent
influence upon the national life of our country” (1908, p. 362). A bit
later, Carus writes that perhaps the fever had broken, noting that while
pragmatism “is still agitating the philosophical world, and . . . James
continues the good fight dealing blows right and left”, fortunately “prag-
matism does not seem to spread further, and its ingenious leader now
assumes more and more the defensive” (1910a, p. 139).6
Paul Carus and Pragmatism 13
After James’s death at the age of 68 on 26 August 1910, Carus writes
that he
will be missed by friends and antagonists for with all his faults as
a thinker he was a man of unusual genius, who by the very way in
which he attacked the problems in which he was interested stirred
the imagination and quickened the spirit of inquiry.
(1910f, p. 638)
One emphasis here is a further indication of Carus’s personal regard for

James. As he similarly writes earlier that year: “Rambling but witty, full
of misconceptions but entertaining . . . such is the style of the leader of
the pragmatic movement”, who is “a man of great vigor and ingenuity”.
James’s “writings possess a charm that is unrivaled. He may be wrong
in all his contentions, but he is never dull” (1910a, p. 144). A second
emphasis in Carus’s commentaries is his condemnation of the many
errors of pragmatism. A listing of what he sees as James’s philosophical
faws would include: (1) James’s lack of precision; (2) his poetic, and even
mystical, approach to philosophy at a time when the discipline should be
striving to approximate science; (3) his orientation towards psychology
rather than logic; (4) his complete misunderstanding of the nature of
truth; and (5) his resultant subjectivism, relativism, and pluralism. We
can consider these interconnected criticisms in sequence.
Carus is explicit in his criticism of James for imprecision. He writes
that James “uses his words very indiscriminately”, and his writings fol-
low “the impulse of the moment” (1909b, p. 89). Moreover, he writes
that the many misinterpretations of James’s ideas are largely his own
fault, and not the fault of the inadequacies of readers and commenta-
tors. Carus thus rejects James’s response that these critics were “distort-
ing his views into silly absurdities which he did not mean to say” and
his attempts to put down their criticisms “with such phrases as, ‘this is
the usual slander’ [James, 1975a, p. 147]” (1910a, p. 139). On the con-
trary, Carus writes, “the main reason” why James is so badly misunder-
stood is “his own carelessness” (1910a, p. 141). To emphasize this point,
Carus notes that he has “always quoted him in his ipsissima verba, and
if words mean what they say, Professor James is decidedly to be blamed
if he has been uniformly misunderstood” (1909b, p. 85, 1910a, p. 140).
A deeper problem, from Carus’s perspective, is that James’s imprecision
betrays a lack of “clearness of thought”, which Carus considers to be
“the first requisite for a philosopher” (1910a, p. 144). Moreover, James’s
imprecision seems to Carus to be a choice. James “has no patience with
a thinker who demands consistency or endeavors to systematize the plu-
rality of facts”, he writes. “Exactness of method seems to hamper his
mind and would naturally appear to him as pedantry” (1908, pp. 355,
359–360).
14 James Campbell
A second theme in Carus’s critique of James is that his approach
to philosophy is lyrical in nature and betrays his personal inclination
towards mysticism. “The language of Professor James”, Carus writes, “is
poetic, not exact”, and his “temper is not scientific but that of a poet or a
prophet . . . guided by inspiration” (pp. 354, 360, 1909e, p. 318). Carus
continues that in his pragmatism, James “overestimates the significance
of sentiment and underrates the importance of the intellect”. James offers
us “a philosophy of mood, of temper, of feeling, of subjectivity”, and
downplays “the rigid demands of intellect, of science, of consistency of
system”. For his part, Carus does not reject such “temperamental expres-
sions” overall, only in a context like this one, where James “parades his
subjectivism as philosophy, indeed as the one philosophy to the exclusion
of an objective or a scientific philosophy” (1910a, p. 143). While not
denying the importance of personality to life, Carus maintains that such
individual “effusions” are simply not philosophy. Properly understood,
they are “rhapsodies” or “poetry” or “literature”, but they are not “what
is so strongly needed in our day, a philosophy of science, a philosophy
that is worth while studying and which is a desideratum of scientists”
(1908, p. 343; 1910a, p. 143).
The counterpoint to Carus’s criticism of James as a philosophical poet
is his own defense of philosophy properly understood. While James “is
a fascinating personality, original and interesting in his very vagaries,
genial and ingenious, versatile and learned”, sadly he “is not scientific
in his habits of thought, he is not critical, and I have the impression
that he cherishes a dislike for science” (1908, p. 359). For James, what
Carus calls “the personal equation” is of primary importance, and James
“judges science and the scientific labors of others after his own mode of
thought”. Such an attitude
is desirable in a poet, but not in a philosopher; it is good in belles

lettres but not in science; and no harm would be done if his pragma-
tism were received simply as an artistic movement that has a purely
esthetical significance but should not be taken seriously.
(1908, p. 360; 1909a, p. 78)
Carus notes that he “must openly confess that James’s loose way of phi-
losophizing does not exercise a wholesome infuence on the young gener-
ation”, and, if James’s direction were followed, “philosophy as a science
would not and should not exist, for all that were left of philosophy would
be subjectivism, which means an expression of our attitude towards the
world” (1908, p. 359).
A third theme in Carus’s critique is that James is more a psychologist
than a logician, more committed to trying to understand how people do
think than to demonstrating how they should think. For Carus, this empha-
sis indicates that James’s pragmatism should be seen more as psychology
than as philosophy.7 “As a psychology”, he writes, “pragmatism presents
us with a correct, or fairly correct, picture of the average type of man, but
as a philosophy it is a failure because it treats the average as the standard
and overlooks the existence of a higher type” (1910c, p. 375). Pragmatism
overlooks, in other words, the primacy of reason over experience. “Prag-
matism, according to Professor James, is the philosophy of temperament,
of mood, of personal attitude”, Carus writes (1908, p. 355),8 “and so he
naturally resents whatever would put a check upon the liberty of his pref-
erences. . . . Professor James himself wants the vagueness of psychological
moods recognized as philosophy, and he scorns logic” (p. 355; p. 329).
In fact, he writes, James has “an aversion to arguments”, whose prescrip-
tions “smack of intellectualism which is an abomination in his eyes. His
preference is based upon sentimental grounds” (p. 351).9 Carus is particu-
larly concerned with the way that pragmatism validates “the significance
of the personal equation in thinking”. He grants that James’s pragmatism
“works well in explaining how certain thinkers arrive at definite results”.
His point is that it fails – and “fails most significantly” – to produce “a
true philosophy”. Carus continues that “we might say that pragmatism (if
it is to be taken seriously) actually denies the possibility of philosophy as
an objective science” (1909a, p. 78).
Carus does, in fact, show some respect for pragmatism as a method
of psychological inquiry. He admits, for example, that he agrees with
James “in the recognition of the personal element that enters into the
makeup of our philosophies”. Rather than championing this “personal
equation” as James does, however, Carus wants “to eliminate it and build
upon the assured conclusions of our thought a philosophy of objective
significance” (pp. 81–82; 1908, p. 342). Phrased slightly differently: “The
mistake of the pragmatist consists in regarding the part which the per-
sonal equation plays as the essential feature of cognition. What is a mere
shortcoming of thought is raised to the dignity of the main principle”
(1909a, p. 80). Carus notes that James “claims for his faith the right to
be impervious to logic; and he denies the right of any pretended logic
to veto his own faith. Of course that closes the case and all argument
must cease”. He indicates that his own “temperament” is different from
James’s, “for my convictions have been profoundly influenced by logi-
cal argument”, and he notes that “there are many other people in the
same plight as I am” (1908, p. 341). Still, it seems unlikely that he would
seriously attribute his own scientific habits to accidental psychological
influences on his work. Rather, his point must be that he has recognized
what he sees as the essential need for a monistic interpretation of sci-
ence. Carus believes that James “continues to preach his peculiar kind
of pragmatism which he serves by rejecting the ‘authority of intellectual-
ist logic’”. By this renunciation, however, James “surrenders at the same
time the only method of systematically arranging the data of experience,
and so falls into the bottomless pit of pluralism” (1909e, p. 318).
16 James Campbell
A fourth theme in Carus’s critique of James’s pragmatism emphasizes
what he takes to be the total inadequacy of its position on truth.10 Prag-
matism, he writes, “does not believe in consistency and repudiates the
unity of truth. It knows only truths in the plural and these truths have
no objective significance; they are shifting and without stability” (1910d,
pp. 510–511; 1911b, p. 41). Carus, for his part, stresses the evolutionary
importance of truth understood as unitary. “So far truth has guided us
safely from the beginning of mentality”, he writes, “it has endowed man
with reason, it has created the sciences, inspired the inventor’s imagina-
tion and is still leading mankind onward on the path of progress” (1910d,
p. 512; 1910c, p. 375). James and other like-minded thinkers have put
truth “on trial”, desiring to replace it with “a truth that is variegated,
fickle, multi-significant”. Carus continues that “the very backbone of
truth, its consistency, the unison of all truths, has been doubted and even
denied. The belief in the stability of truth, in its persistence and eternality
has been denounced as a superstition”. Still, he is confident that, despite
this “fad” of mistaken ideas, “the old time-worn and time-honored ideal
of truth as being one and eternal, will sooner or later assert itself again”
(1910d, pp. 512–513).
One central aspect of this critique of James’s position on truth is that
James’s account is too plastic. “Science”, Carus writes, “rests upon the sup-
position that a statement once actually proved to be true remains true”, a
truth “is and will remain a truth forever” (1908, pp. 324, 348). For James,
on the contrary, he complains, “the plasticity of truth makes pragmatism
elastic and this playing fast and loose with truth is deemed a great advan-
tage”. On this point, Carus’s defense of permanence is adamant. “I beg
leave to belong to the old-fashioned people who still believe that all truths
must agree and that the truth of yesterday will be the truth of to-morrow”,
he writes. “Here lies the rock of ages which is the basis of science”. With-
out such permanence, he continues, “pluralism would be established for
good”, although this pluralism “would look very much like nihilism”
(pp. 344–345). Formulated slightly differently, Carus tells us that, although
James “may not actually deny the objective standard of truth, he elevates
mere subjective belief to the dignity of the name truth which, if this were
justifiable, would practically render the latter irrelevant” (p. 341).
Another central aspect of Carus’s critique of James on truth is his
rejection of the equation of true and useful. “While we regard a scien-
tific inquiry into irrelevant truths as useless, and while we could gauge the
importance of a truth by its practical significance”, Carus writes, “we deem
it a very slipshod method of philosophizing to identify the utility of an
idea with its truth. Yet this is actually the meaning of pragmatism accord-
ing to Professor James” (p. 327).11 Carus notes that “in the long run truth
will always be the best, but for that reason we deem it rash to identify ‘the
true’ with ‘whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief’”. With
regard to food, for example, we cannot identify “what is wholesome with
what is palatable” (p. 323). He similarly points to what he calls “a useful
lie” (p. 324), one that can work “decidedly satisfactorily” – especially for
the liar. “If certain errors are helpful to me it may be to my own profit
to spread them and make people believe in them” (1909b, p. 88; 1908,
p. 324). A third example of Carus’s rejection of the equation of the useful
and the true is his belief that “pragmatism is at a great advantage in the
religious field”, regardless of belief. “If one finds it profitable to believe
in God, very well, to him the existence of God is a truth”, he writes. “If
another finds a scientific satisfaction in the non-existence of God, to him
atheism is true” (1908, p. 325).
A fifth theme in Carus’s critique is that, because he “most emphati-
cally uphold[s] the objective significance of truth”, he is “decidedly
opposed to the subjectivism of Professor James” (1909c, p. 145). The
pragmatists, he continues, “scorn theory, rationalism, and any methodi-
cal unification such as is attempted by monism, and the result is that
they lose themselves in mere subjectivism”. If, as James seems to believe,
“the most essential element of a philosophy” is simply “the philoso-
pher’s subjective attitude constituting the personal equation of his mode
of thinking”, then Carus maintains that “a philosophy of science would
be impossible, and philosophy would sink to the level of the poetical
effusions of mysticism” (1909f, pp. 8, 22–23; 1909e, p. 318). Carus
also asserts, in what appears to be a priori fashion, that “the human
mind . . . naturally and necessarily views the world as one”, whereas
the world appears to James – contrary to Carus’s requirements of
reason – “in its complex elements as a plurality”. Further, James “has
never become acquainted with a justification of the monistic tendency
that pervades science” (1908, p. 331). James also fails to grasp “the fact
that reason is a unity, and that in its gradual evolution it has developed
under the influence of the principle of oneness” (p. 331). For Carus, it
is also central to realize that “man has acquired his humanity through
his reason” and that reason, “the faculty of thinking in abstractions”
(p. 336), is our primary faculty.
When Carus writes that James’s philosophy is “pluralistic”, he means
explicitly that, while scientific questions should have unitary answers,
for James “different interpretations remain peacefully side by side”. If
we defend with James “the personal equation and . . . accept moods as
facts”, then we must accept every individual’s interpretation as “equally
true” (p. 343). Carus writes that this tolerant pragmatic attitude “is
about the same as if somebody were to declare that in the realm of sci-
ence astronomy and all different astrological systems are of equal value”.
Carus further criticizes James for maintaining that “there are no real laws
of nature”, but rather that “all laws of nature are mere approximations”
(p. 358).12 Again, related to his claim that reason requires monism, Carus
suggests that “pragmatism drifts into pluralism as surely as a disinte-
grated soul will develop a multiple personality” (1909a, p. 84).
18 James Campbell
In summary, Carus admits to being “rather astonished” at the extraor-
dinary level of success of James’s philosophy “among professional or so-
called professional thinkers, which indicates that the majority of them are
still in a state of naive immaturity” (1909e, p. 318). For Carus, pragma-
tism “describes the actual state of things on the lower plane of mankind”,
where reason plays a lesser role than the vagaries of individual experi-
ence. He believes that James has shown “a dislike to the intellect and has
opened a campaign against what he calls ‘vicious intellectualism’”. James
has further emphasized “the power of ‘the will to believe’” but down-
played inquiries “into the rare cases of the influence of the still small
voice of the intellect which modifies and even radically changes the belief,
yea the character of a man in spite of his will” (1910c, p. 375). While
Carus further admits that “the illiterate and the uncultured can still be
found in all the continents of the earth” and endorses James’s empirical
claim that “‘the great majority of the human race . . . live in plural times
and spaces, interpenetrant and durcheinander’” [James, 1975b, p. 87]
(1908, p. 336), he still calls for a world in which reason plays a larger
role.13 He reaffirms that he does not see “what renders the notion of the
oneness of time and space objectionable” and that he fails “to appreciate
the advantage of pluralism” (p. 336). Carus continues that James believes
“that it is the right of everybody to believe as he wills, and that the will
(i.e., the idiosyncrasies) of every man is the main factor in the makeup of
his belief and that arguments are of no avail” (pp. 340–341).
Few contemporary philosophers who are in any way sympathetic to
James’s perspective would accept Carus’s overall characterization of his
pragmatism. (1) Rather than criticizing James’s lack of precision, for
example, we can question Carus’s belief in the primacy of precision itself.
(2) Similarly, there is no consensus that philosophy should approximate a
science or even how that goal might be achieved. (3) Philosophers today
are also more skeptical of the adequacy of an account of experience that
places logic above psychology. (4) With regard to truth, it seems clear
now that James was attempting to rethink our inherited commonsense
assumptions, even if that meant a fundamental reconstruction of our tra-
ditional notion of truth. (5) Finally, many philosophers today are more
cognizant of the values of pluralism based in the recognition of individual-
istic perspectives that Carus criticizes as relativism or subjectivism.14 Still,
examining Carus’s presentation of James will help us to grasp the nature
of his own philosophical perspective better, and it should offer us help in
understanding the European reception of James’s pragmatism. More work
is necessary, however, to flesh out Carus’s own positive position.
Carus writes at one point that “the aim of all my writings centers in
the endeavor to build up a sound and tenable philosophy, one that would
be as objective as any branch of the natural sciences”. His ultimate goal
here is clearly to develop “philosophy as a science” (1909f, p. 1). This
approach to philosophy, he continues, “is actually dawning in the minds
of scientific men, and through them in the minds of all thinkers” and
is “finally destined to become a power in the life of the multitudes of
mankind” (pp. 10, 3–4). Carus continues that this scientific approach to
philosophy,
which is sometimes called monism or a unitary world conception,

sometimes positivism or the world conception which drops the
assumptions of metaphysical entities and aims at making philoso-
phy a comprehensive and systematic statement of facts, may fairly be
considered as victorious in the domain of scientific inquiry.
(1913, p. 124; 1896, pp. 1–5)
It is his further belief that “it is only a question of time when it will
invade the domain of popular thought and religious life”. As examples
of this long-term process, he points to how monism “overthrew, in the
domain of science, astrology, alchemy, the belief in a phlogiston or fre
substance, the belief in magic, the hope of fnding the philosopher’s stone,
and all kindred notions”. In their place, monism “gave us astronomy,
chemistry, and all the modern sciences which are slowly accomplishing
much grander things than any alchemist ever could anticipate or hope
for” (1913, pp. 124–125).15 In contrast to James’s freewheeling plural-
ism, Carus maintains that
philosophy has always endeavored to trace the unity of our concep-

tion of the world, and a pluralistic philosophy which, while clinging
to particulars and to individual facts, denies unity and scorns system
as pure theory is practically a surrender of the ideal of philosophi-
cal thought and implies, to say the least, a suggestion that science is
impossible.
(1910b, p. 232)
Carus further believes that, when attempting to solve any scientifc prob-
lem that is “genuine and legitimate, there will be but one solution of it
that is right, all other are either false or perhaps at best approximations”.
He continues that this solution is “predetermined” and “must be discov-
ered” (1908, pp. 328–329).
We can consider these three points in sequence, beginning with Carus’s
commitment to the uniformity of nature. “Experience has taught us”,
he writes, “to look upon all truths as one great system of more or less
general uniformities, which are co-, sub- and super-ordinated in such a
way that all of them complement one another” and to recognize that “the
more general truths comprise and thereby explain the more particular
ones” (1910d, pp. 507, 508; 1909f, p. 21). For Carus, then, “there is
a pre-established harmony of all truths” (1908, p. 329). Our ability to
recognize this uniformity is the result of what he calls “reason”, which
20 James Campbell
“enables man to see in every single occurrence an instance of a general
rule” (1910d, p. 508). Moreover, he writes that, as rational beings “we
cannot help searching for a unitary conception of the different phenom-
ena, and our mind will never be at ease unless we at least feel convinced
that we have found it”. Carus continues that “the constitution of the
human mind . . . predisposes man for monism” and “must thus naturally
lead us to a monistic philosophy which attempts to understand all the
single phenomena of the universe, as well as the whole of reality, by one
universal law or from one all-embracing principle” (1894, p. 21).16 In
further opposition to pluralism, Carus maintains that “every success of
scientific inquiry, every progress of research in the several fields of knowl-
edge, every new invention based upon methodical experiment” indicates
that there is uniformity in nature, and “these several advances corrobo-
rate the reliability of science” (1909f, p. 1; 1910b, p. 232). The results of
these various experiments, he writes, “never conflict with each other. . . .
[T]hey never contradict one another”. To Carus, this means that “the
world in which we live is a cosmos, not a chaos” (1909f, p. 4); it is, in
fact, “the law-ordained cosmos . . . pictured in man’s religion” (1910b,
p. 241; 1894, pp. 48, 91, 121).
The second theme in Carus’s defense of monism is his belief that sci-
ence assumes a kind of unchanging and necessary natural order. “The
order of the Universe”, he writes, “is thus recognized as an immanent
necessity” (1894, p. 52), and “the constitution of the world, the sum total
of natural laws, is immutable” (1908, pp. 333–334; 1943, pp. 42–43).
Of particular importance to Carus here are what he calls the “formal
sciences”, which serve as core examples of this necessity. He believes that
the regularities of our experienced lives, “which naturalists formulate as
natural laws”, can be “ultimately reduced to principles of the formal sci-
ences, logic, arithmetic, mathematics, etc.”. Moreover, he believes that
“all formulas of scientific certainty, if correctly stated, are finally just as
intrinsically necessary as the equation 2 x 2 = 4”. These formulas “are
immutable; they must be so, and cannot be otherwise, and we can under-
stand that if certain features of reality are given, the consequences are
definitely determined, and cannot be otherwise” (1904, p. 463).17 Still,
Carus offers a possibly contradictory addendum to this vision of neces-
sity when he writes that “monism is different from the other philosophi-
cal views in so far as it is not so much a finished system, but a plan for
a system”. As such, his sense of necessity “admits of constant realization
and further perfection, in all the many branches of knowledge” (1894,
p. 24). As he formulates this point elsewhere, “reality is a constant flux
and accordingly is never ready made or complete” (1908, p. 333).18
Carus’s third monistic emphasis is that this formal nature of existence
is to be uncovered by scientific inquiry. “In spite of Professor James”,
he writes, “we insist that truth is not made by man, but must be dis-
covered, for . . . the nature of truth is predetermined”. Carus continues
that truth is “rigid and not plastic, it is independent of our likes and
dislikes” (p. 329, 1910d, p. 509). Unlike James, whose focus is on human
action and its creative potential, Carus emphasizes only human efforts to
advance science by recording the workings of nature.19 So, for example,
he writes that “man cannot invent mathematics; he must discover its
theorems. He cannot make the laws of nature; he must describe them.
He cannot establish facts; he must investigate, and can only determine
the truth” (1913, p. 108). After we make these discoveries, we can work
better with nature. As one example, Carus notes that “if the architect’s
rules are in conformity with the natural conditions, such as scientists
formulate in what is called laws of nature, he will be able to build boldly
and securely”. In a much more troublesome analogy, however, he main-
tains that “if the laws of legislators are based upon a correct conception
of the moral law of nature, the nations who adopt them will prosper and
progress” (p. 109). Carus states the basis of his belief here as follows:
“The moral law of nature is the eternal abiding reality, while the laws
and injunctions of man are only its transitory and more or less imperfect
expressions” (p. 110).
Carus believes, as we have seen, that the order of natural laws is immu-
table, but his formulation of monism, or monistic positivism, indicates
that he does not view it as “a finished system”. On the contrary, any
monism is “but a reliable plan for a system” that allows for “a constantly
increasing realization” and “a further perfection”. The goal of the monis-
tic philosopher is to offer “a methodical arrangement of experience so as
to present a unitary or consistent conception of the world”. Moreover,
this idea of “a unitary conception of the world has been constantly cor-
roborated by the progress of science” (1896, p. 4). Carus believes that
science is our only useful method for uncovering the order of nature and
continuing to progress. He writes that “mankind has become more and
more convinced of the efficiency of science”, and consequently, “the phi-
losophy of science prevails even now as a still latent but nevertheless
potent factor in the life of mankind” (1909f, p. 2). Carus further believes
that “never before in the history of the world has science played such a
prominent part and received more recognition as the main factor of civi-
lization”. There is also, he continues, “a general agreement as to the hope
that we stand at the threshold of the age of science, which means that all
problems of life will be solved by scientific inquiry and the old super-
stitions will be swept away” (1912, pp. 397–398).20 Some individuals –
even some philosophers – are unprepared to grasp this, Carus notes; the
abstractions of science are “empty and unmeaning to the unschooled”
and fully significant only “to those who have acquired the habits of exact
thought” (1943, p. 224).21
The advance of science does require, however, that we commit ourselves
to monism. “Science is a method of inquiry and as such it means sys-
tem”, Carus writes. “The results of science are systematically formulated
22 James Campbell
universalities, i.e., groups of facts of the same character described in their
essential nature, singling out the determinant features and omitting all
the rest”. He identifies these formal universalities as natural laws, “the
backbone of what we call system in science” (1910b, pp. 232–233).
Rejecting what he sees as Humean doubts that science is “the result of
good chances, of mere lucky haphazard successes”, Carus maintains that
our recognition of system “is the result of the formal sciences”. He con-
tinues that
there is developing in the present age a deeply rooted confidence that

science is more than the result of accidental guesses, and we believe
that we have produced the evidence of the attainment of scientific
certitude, the foundation of which is laid in the philosophy of form.
(pp. 240–241)
For Carus, these formulations can be characterized as the ideas of God.

Carus uses the concept “God”, although not intending thereby any
sort of personal deity,22 to indicate the high degree of reverence with
which he holds this monism. In 1894, for example, he writes that order
“is immanent in the universe and, in fact, it is God”. He continues that
“human reason mirrors this order” in our minds, “and thus the sacred
legend is justified in declaring that man has been created in the image of
God” (1894, p. 49). He further believes that “the order of the universe
is not transcendent; it is not imposed upon nature from the outside”. In
fact, “the order of the world in its mechanical regularity is immanent”.
Carus’s world is, as we have seen, a cosmos rather than a chaos, “and if
God is to be called the order of the universe, monism teaches that God is
immanent; God and the universe are one” (p. 91). In 1904, he elaborates
on his position, writing that
the God of science is the true God, and the God of mediaeval theolo-
gians is a mere makeshift, and substitution for the true God, a tem-
porary surrogate of God, a surrogate which at the time, was good
enough for immature minds, but too often only led people astray.
He prefers to support “the superpersonal God of science whose cause

is identical with truth, with righteousness and justice” over “the God of
miracle and special revelation” (1904, p. 460).23 In 1908, Carus writes
that “natural laws are formulas which describe uniformities”, and,
when presented in “exact statements”, these laws can be considered to
be “God’s thoughts”. As such, these laws cannot be “transient”: “God’s
thoughts are eternal, and they appear to the scientist as the immutable
laws of nature”. Moreover, since these immutable laws “are part and
parcel of God, then God certainly is . . . a true omnipresence and a true
universality” (1943, pp. 44–45). He further writes in 1910 that God is
“that systematic unison of all the correlates of truth. . . . God is the one-
ness of all the verities of existence” (1910d, p. 511).
Carus admits that we are not yet fully cognizant of this system of divine
laws. He writes that while “there are scientific minds who can formulate
statements with objective exactness . . . the multitudes of people are unscien-
tific” (1909a, p. 83). He intends this not as a critique of science. It is, rather,
a criticism of the large number of people who fail to see science as a public
means to obtain objective and eternal answers to fundamental questions
about the nature of our existence and who fail to pursue a philosophy that
would advance this understanding of science. Moreover, perhaps referring
to perceived saboteurs like James,24 Carus even grants that “the conception
of science as a method, as a systematic plan of investigation, as a consistent
principle of arranging facts in order, has not yet become common property
among our main investigators” (1910b, p. 231). From his own monistic
perspective on science, pragmatism appears to be a reactionary movement.
“To the pre-scientific man conviction is truth, and the intensity of his con-
viction is naively accepted as the measure of the reliability of truth”, Carus
writes. “The pragmatist is really naive enough to continue, or rather to fall
back upon this pre-scientific stage of thought”. Science to the pragmatist
is no more than “an assumption”, and the pragmatist shows no respect for
those “who have laid a foundation for philosophy as an objective science”
(1909a, p. 81; 1910c, p. 375). For the pragmatist, “the will to believe and
the personal equation are more important than the assured results of scien-
tific inquiry” (1910e, p. 615).
One of the points that Carus stresses is that scientific progress requires
the abandonment of outdated assumptions while still preserving the ideal
of science as the set of final answers. In part to clarify this point, Carus
offers a distinction between what he calls “a genuine scientific truth”,
which is “a formula which describes the essential features of a group
of facts”, and “a scientific theory”, which is “a tentative explanation of
facts” (1910a, p. 142). In another version of this distinction, he writes, “a
truth is a description of a certain set of features or of an interrelation of
phenomena which covers the entire range of facts”, whereas “a theory is
a tentative statement of a truth; it is a working hypothesis, temporarily
made and awaiting verification” (1910b, p. 236; 1909b, p. 92). For Carus,
the essential difference is between final and temporary validity: it is “not
the man-made formulas” but “the laws of nature, theorems of mathemat-
ics etc.” that contain “the eternality of truth” (1908, p. 330). Operating
in this spirit, Carus grants that “theories and hypotheses are preliminary
and we must always be prepared to surrender them”, while at the same
time requiring that “those features of facts which remain, . . . those eternal-
ities of existence which make science possible, are not subject to change”.
Further, he notes that we do not consider “the change of a theory as
a ‘breakdown’ of the notions of scientific truth”, since “while theories
change, truths remain forever” (1910a, p. 142).25 Thinking pragmatically,
24 James Campbell
however, we might ask in a Jamesian fashion about the practical value of
Carus’s commitment to eternal truth(s), especially when, in the course of
our scientific inquiries, we can never know how true any of our theories
really are. In this context, Carus seems to be demonstrating primarily a
moral commitment to divine order.
I would like to close with a further consideration of Carus’s narrow
conception of philosophy, especially as it is wedded to his necessary and
immutable understanding of science. One significant result here is that
Carus seems to eliminate any difference between natural and social sci-
ence, a serious problem if we keep in mind the important role that the life
sciences play in James’s work. I say that Carus “seems” to elide natural
and social science because his position is unsettled. At one point, he writes
that “the factor of the personal equation is less important where the facts
are plain and where the observations consists (as, e.g., in astronomy) of
mere measuring or counting, but it grows with the complication of the
problem”. Here, there appears to be some sort of agreement with James
about the human element at the core of scientific practice. Carus accepts
that “in the domain of philosophy, religion, ethics, sociology, political
economy, and generally in the interpretation of all spiritual aspirations
of man, more personal interests are at stake than in astronomy”. Still, he
treats this difference not as an intellectual advantage but as a voluntaris-
tic disadvantage. He writes, for example, that because “a general belief
in a certain doctrine is an important factor in actual life, man’s judgment
is much more easily influenced by his desires than in natural sciences”
(1909a, p. 79; 1909f, p. 6). He thus seems to be considering not two dif-
ferent approaches to scientific inquiry – natural and social – but rather
the approach of “real” science versus that of personal whimsy. Carus
continues in this vein when he contrasts the defense of personal interests
negatively with the purity of science. “Men who allow their views in poli-
tics to be shaped by private interests lack breadth of mind and fairness
towards others”, he writes, “while sentimentalists who are incapable of
logical reasoning whenever their feelings are engaged are pathological”.
For Carus, on the contrary, we should not “surrender our aspiration for
objectivity in thought and leave the decision as to what should be rec-
ognized as truth to the prejudices of subjective preferences” (pp. 79–80).
While he allows that “in religion, sentiment is for the most part the domi-
nant power”, he still maintains that “the ultimate criterion of philosophy
is the intellect” (1909f, pp. 25–26).
Carus thus rejects any possibility that there are “two domains of truth”
(1909a, p. 80). For him, “the so-called spiritual sciences, psychology,
the history of religion, philosophy, ethics, are based on a condition of
objective facts just as much as is the knowledge of the purely mechani-
cal processes of nature”. Again, the difference between the two seems to
be the acceptance of individual caprice by the followers of the former
approaches versus the defense of objectivity by the followers of the latter
approach. As he writes, “men of a sentimental temperament are more
easily influenced in their judgments in the so-called spiritual domain of
the sciences, philosophy, psychology, ethics, etc.”, whereas “in the domain
of the intellectual truth, logic, physics, chemistry, astronomy, etc.”, any
intrusion of the personal equation must be rejected (pp. 80–81).
Carus never seems to surrender the primacy of formal thought. In1894
he praises the “formal” sciences – mathematics, arithmetic, geometry,
logic, etc. – because they yield both uniformity and necessity: “the laws
of form being everywhere the same” (1894, p. 52). He writes in 1909
that “science or the economy of thought is conditioned by the systematic
character of the formal sciences”. So strong is this attachment that he
characterizes his philosophy “as ‘the philosophy of form’” (1909f, pp. 5,
3; 1894, pp. 19, 46, 49, 54; 1908, p. 331).26 Still, Carus writes, in what I
would characterize as good Jamesian fashion, that
a philosopher must not be a one-sided intellectualist. He must bear in

mind that the noetic operations of man’s mind are only one feature
of his life; man is also endowed with sentiment and above all he is an
actor, a doer, a worker.
(1909f, p. 25)
There remain a number of loose ends here, although individuals grounded

in European traditions may feel less discord between James and Carus
than I do. Some of these clashes may result, as I have suggested, from the
pair simply talking past each other. For example, both demonstrate in
their work the remainder of a religious core, although James would have
us listen to the god of the personal soul and Carus to the god of the eternal
forms. Similarly, both recognize the process of scientific inquiry and some
distinction between theories and truths. Carus rejects, for example, such
Jamesian formulations as “Ptolemaic astronomy, euclidean space, aris-
totelian logic, scholastic metaphysics, were expedient for centuries, but
human experience has boiled over those limits, and we now call these
things only relatively true, or true within those borders of experience.
‘Absolutely’ they are false”.27 In place of James’s claim, however, Carus
offers the following formulation: “Ptolemaic astronomy was not true at
the time of Ptolemy; it never was true, nor ever will be true”. Carus is
willing to grant that the Ptolemaic system “worked well enough for their
own needs”, but only because its proponents “turned pragmatists and
ceased to trouble about consistency” (1908, pp. 345–346). But what is
the real difference here, beyond the fact that James emphasizes the devel-
oping process of scientific inquiry and Carus the greater permanence of
eventual scientific products? In addition to these instances of talking past
one another, of course, there remain fundamental differences between
Carus and James, centering especially around Carus’s beliefs in neces-
sity and scientific objectivity and his general antidemocratic mind-set and
26 James Campbell
James’s openness to possibility and his defense of the role of the indi-
vidual. The significance of these differences to the European reception of
pragmatism remains to be seen.
Notes
1. For information on Carus’s early life, see Henderson (1993, pp. 1–11). Carus
is perhaps best known at present for the American Philosophical Associa-
tion’s premier lecture series, the Paul Carus Lectures, that began in 1922 and
continues to this day.
2. I am translating here from the printed record of Carus’s comments at the
World Congress: “Der Pragmatismus komme zwar aus Amerika, aber, Gott
sei Dank, hat die Bewegung noch nicht das ganze Land in Besitz genommen.
Der Pragmatismus ist eine Krankheit hervorgegangen aus der Sucht etwas
Neues und ganz Originelles zu schaffen. Was aber wahr daran ist, ist nicht
neu und was neu ist, ist falsch” (1909g, p. 737). Elsewhere, Carus writes that
pragmatism may claim to be “a new philosophical movement, but the word
‘pragmatic’ from which the term is derived has been in existence for more
than two thousand years”, and the philosophy is better seen as “a modern-
ized redaction of the ancient philosophy of the sophists” (1908, pp. 321,
361). Thus, while James may believe that he is starting “the world over
again”, he is in fact repeating “the errors of the sophists” (1909b, p. 91).
Carus further notes that, were the pragmatists only “more familiar with the
history of philosophy”, they would not claim any originality for pragmatism,
“the leading ideas of which are old errors” (1910a, p. 140).
3. With regard to Charles Sanders Peirce, Carus writes: “We do not believe that
C.S. Peirce and Prof. William James can be lumped together as if their prag-
matism were one and the same. Each of them has his own preferences but
both are very different. Mr. Peirce is strong in logic and truly scientific in his
work, while William James is very original and ingenious” (1910e, p. 615;
Henderson, 1993, pp. 126–141). For some further contemporary discussions
of the varieties of pragmatism, see Armstrong, (1909a; 1909b), Ewald (1909;
1912), and Schiller (1908–1909; 1909).
4. James (1985, p. 396).
5. As William H. Hay (1956) writes, like many other thinkers (including James),
Carus was attempting to deal with “the same problem of trying to find what
form they can give to their religious feelings, their inclination to worship,
their use of prayer, their belief in a ground of moral rules, and their hope of
immortality, when they are faced with their loss of faith in traditional theol-
ogy” (p. 509).
6. Carus offers a wider criticism of what he sees as anti-intellectualism: “prag-
matism is only a symptom of a movement that has spread over a wide circle
of thinkers in France and Germany who are not directly allied to it” (1911b,
p. 41). Among the other figures whom Carus criticized are Henri Bergson,
Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Nietzsche. See Goebel (1919, p. 519) and
Meyer (1962, pp. 605–606).
7. It may be necessary to remind philosophers of the importance of James’s
volume The Principles of Psychology (1890) to the field of psychology and to
his world-wide reputation as a psychologist. So deeply committed was James
to a psychological approach to philosophy, and to a philosophical approach
to psychology, that I have characterized him as a “psycholopher” (Campbell,
2017, pp. 25–32, 38–41).
8. James’s most familiar formulations of the importance of temperament
are his discussions of “the tender-minded” and “the tough-minded” (1975b,
pp. 11–15) and of “the healthy-minded” and the “sick souls” (1985,
pp. 71–138).
9. For his part, James (1977) emphasizes the importance of each person’s vision:
“philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of logic, . . . logic only
finding reasons for the vision afterwards” (p. 81).
10. Carus dedicates the volume Truth on Trial as follows: “To the memory of
Professor William James, who with the best intentions put truth on trial,
and by his very errors advanced the cause of truth, this book is dedicated in
friendly remembrance of courtesies exchanged in spite of radical difference
of opinion” (1911a, p. vi; 1909b, p. 93; 1910a, p. 144).
11. James does indicate at one point that he is comfortable with saying “either
that ‘it is useful because it is true’ or that ‘it is true because it is useful’. Both
these phrases mean exactly the same thing, namely that here is an idea that
gets fulfilled and can be verified” (1975b, p. 98).
12. James indicates that “most, perhaps all, of our laws are only approxima-
tions. The laws themselves, moreover, have grown so numerous that there
is no counting them; and so many rival formulations are proposed in all the
branches of science that investigators have become accustomed to the notion
that no theory is absolutely a transcript of reality, but that any one of them
may from some point of view be useful” (1975b, p. 33).
13. The tone of Carus’s anti-democratic thinking can be seen in passages like the
following: “Great masses of people . . . are likely to be composed of many
men below the average of education, and people who are in possession of
little knowledge are easily influenced by any opinion that is offered with
great self-assertion. A lack of knowledge is always accompanied with a lack
of critical power” (1905, p. 314).
14. For more information on these and other aspects of James’s thought, see
Campbell (2017).
15. Carus continues: “Positivism will abolish the traditional metaphysicism in
religion, but it will not destroy religion; it will give us a deeper and more
solid and a nobler interpretation of the same facts, which are the ever present
realities of our sublimest hopes and highest aspirations” (1913, pp. 125, v).
16. James rejects this monism, noting that our understanding of rationality
requires, among other criteria, maintaining a balance between simplicity or
order and richness or particularity. “No system of philosophy”, he writes,
“can hope to be universally accepted among men which grossly violates
either need, or entirely subordinates the one to the other” (James, 1979,
p. 59; 1978, p. 41). While emphasizing richness and particularity, James
attempts to maintain a balance; Carus, for his part, recognizes only simplic-
ity and order.
17. Perhaps along this line, Carus offers the puzzling comment that “the idea of
man, i.e., the possible type of manhood, existed before man originated in the
process of evolution. The mental organization of a rational being is a special
application of the universal laws of form, and thus the nature of man as a
rational being, is predetermined in the world’s constitution since eternity”
(1943, pp. 41–42).
18. This understanding of necessity might minimize James’s (1977) fear “of
universal determinism, of the block-universe eternal and without a history”
(p. 140) that is finalized and offers no place for individuals. Still, James pre-
fers a “multiverse”, in which every part is only “in some possible or mediated
connexion”, to Carus’s fully integrated universe (p. 146).
28 James Campbell
19. Carus shows no interest in James’s fundamental distinction between cases
when we just record the events of the world – mathematical formulae, court
decisions, sports results – and cases when we contribute to the result. As
James writes, “in our dealings with objective nature we obviously are record-
ers, not makers, of the truth” and we should refrain from “making up our
minds at all till objective evidence has come” (James, 1979, pp. 25–26). Other
cases, however, require a “personal contribution” of “subjective energy”
because “the course of destiny may be altered by individuals” (James, 1979,
pp. 81–82). Cases of making truths would include the following: whether a
person is to recover from drug addiction, whether a widow is to end her days
in the poor house, and whether a marriage is to survive.
20. James writes that scientifically inclined philosophers like Carus rely on
their own kind of faith: they too are committed to the “belief in something
concerning which doubt is still theoretically possible” (James, 1979, p. 76).
James’s complaint is that these philosophers would deny the legitimacy of
any sort of faith other than faith in science.
21. By adopting monism, Carus also believes that philosophy can regain its place
in “the van of human progress”. He admits that the progressive scientist has
been able to ignore philosophy because it has become “more of a hindrance
than a help to him, blockading his way and spreading a mist before his eyes”.
Should we adopt the shift that Carus is recommending, however, “philoso-
phy is no longer doomed to lie in the stagnant swamp where progress has
become impossible, but strikes out boldly for new fields of noble work and
practical usefulness” (1896, p. iv).
22. Carus writes that “there is a peculiar charm in the God-conception. These
three letters, G-O-D, are a treasure of uncommon riches. They embody all
that is great, and noble, and good, and right, and true. It is one of my greatest
efforts in life to preserve this grand idea from the shipwreck which Christian
paganism (the dogmatic belief in the letter) is bound to incur. To those who
call me an atheist, I answer that I am not a common atheist: I am an atheist
who loves God. But, after a careful inquiry into the problems of the nature
of God and the history of the God-conception, I have come to the conclusion
that my philosophy is not atheistic” (1904, p. 467; Goebel, 1919, p. 518;
Hay, 1956, p. 507).
23. Carus continues: “what I had attributed formerly to an individual being,
a great cosmic monarch, or a purpose-endowed world-soul, was actually
accomplished in a much grander and a more unfailing way by natural law;
and natural law is not the mere formula of the naturalistic, but a living fac-
tor, an omnipresent power that although unmaterial, rules supreme every-
where in exactly the same manner which must be attributed to God if the
conception of God’s nature be freed from gross anthropomorphism” (1904,
pp. 464–465).
24. Others would include the aforementioned Bergson, Freud, and Nietzsche.
25. Carus writes that “James believes that science is not possible, or at least
that what is called science is not reliable, that new fangled theories have
replaced the old orthodox conceptions, that Euclid is antiquated because
[Janos] Bolyai and [Nikolai] Lobatchevsky have excogitated other geometri-
cal systems, and that truth and its exponent science have neither stability nor
objective significance” (1910a, p. 141).
26. It is obvious that Carus’s thought, unlike James’s, is deeply influenced by
Immanuel Kant. He writes, for example, that “Kant is a very great philoso-
pher; he is a giant among thinkers”. Still, Carus remains highly critical of
Kant, whose “great fame was not so much due to his greatness, as to his
mistakes. He propounded a problem to mankind which has kept philosophi-
cal minds busy ever since. His ability consisted in seeing the problem, not in
solving it” (1896, p. 36). Since pursuing this Kantian question does not offer
any resolution to the issues of my inquiry, however, I have not developed
this aspect of Carus’s thought here. Another central aspect of Carus’s writ-
ings that I have not pursued here is his interest in Asian thought, especially
Hinduism and Buddhism (see Bishop, 1974, pp. 517–519; Henderson, 1993,
pp. 89–117).
27. James (1975b, p. 107).
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3 An Ethics of Exemplarity
Emerson in Germany and the
Existentialist Tradition
Dennis Sölch
If pragmatism is the quintessentially American tradition of philosophy,

existentialism can be said to represent the most genuinely European phil-
osophical development. In both cases, the representative nature of the
respective philosophical traditions does not primarily refer to the geo-
graphical origin, but rather to the way they take account of the particular
historical and cultural settings in which they are articulated. Philosophi-
cal inquiry is not seen as a purely theoretical endeavor, but hinges on our
prerational, practical engagement with a world that, in turn, is changed
and shaped by human action. Against Descartes and Kant, both prag-
matism and existentialism share an attitude of metaphysical and moral
antifoundationalism and stress that philosophy must always originate in
and issue back into concrete, lived experience.
To this day, however, the similarities between pragmatism and existen-
tialism have largely gone unnoticed. In what appears to be one of the first
conscious encounters with existentialism from an American viewpoint,
Hannah Arendt seeks to convey the essence of existentialist philosophy in
postwar France to an American audience. Having spent almost a decade
in French exile herself, Arendt in a short article in the American weekly
The Nation paints a vivid image of the intellectual climate in Paris, where
philosophy has come to be an attitude towards life rather than a mere
academic discipline. Philosophical lectures attract large audiences and
textbooks on philosophical problems “preaching no cheap creed and
offering no panacea but, on the contrary, so difficult as to require actual
thinking sell like detective stories” (Arendt, 1946, p. 226). The philoso-
phers most highly esteemed
become newspaper-men, playwrights, novelists. They are not mem-

bers of university faculties but ‘bohemians’ who stay at hotels and
live in the café – leading a public life to the point of renouncing
privacy. And not even success, or so it seems, can turn them into
respectable bores.
(p. 226)
32 Dennis Sölch
Existentialist philosophy, according to Arendt’s depiction, is deeply
immersed in everyday life. It reaches an audience much larger than the
circle of professional academic philosophers, and it is articulated in genres
that are generally considered ill suited for dense philosophical arguments.
And yet, what Arendt observes is not a popularization in the sense of a
reduction of complexity. On the contrary, it elevates the ordinary experi-
ence of daily life and allows it to acquire new signifcance by taking it
beyond the immediacy of conventional forms. The philosophical climate
in Paris thus serves Arendt as a platform for a short sketch of existential-
ist thought. Against the background of Camus’s L’étranger and Sartre’s
Huis Clos, she illustrates their struggle with an “esprit sérieux”: that is,
with the identifcation of the self with the various functions performed
in the particular society that the individual is situated in. With regard
to the particularity of this struggle, philosophy is expressive of specifc
political, cultural, and historical conditions, tying it to a specifc atmo-
sphere and refusing any claim to universality. Existentialism, for Arendt,
represents both an analysis of and a revolt against an alienation that
results from the pretense that the individual life can be adequately under-
stood through abstract concepts. Rather than defning man and society
by recourse to allegedly objective classifcations, the existentialists appeal
to the irreducibility and historical singularity of individual experience
that always outruns all its functions and identifcations. The individual
subject transcends all possible fxations towards a future self that does
not exist prior to being lived and acted out. It may fnd orientation in the
example of others, but it cannot ultimately delegate its own responsibility
for its choices and actions to others.
Arendt (1946) concludes that existentialism constitutes a deep “break
in Western tradition” (p. 228). Its fusion of different forms of expres-
sion, its explicit inclusion of feelings and bodily sensations in philosoph-
ical arguments, and its downright rejection of universalism do indeed
appear to be unprecedented. Existentialism is set apart from the history
of Western philosophy, including the young tradition of pragmatism.
Neither Arendt nor the existentialists themselves seemed to be aware
that, quite in contrast to the alleged break with the previous tradition of
philosophy, the roots of their antifoundationalist conception of human
existence in general and their idea of exemplary lives in particular reach
back a century into American history. Existentialist thinking, to a con-
siderable extent, was anticipated in American philosophy, especially in
the writings of one of the early founding fathers of the pragmatist tra-
dition, namely Ralph Waldo Emerson. Up to the late 1920s, Emerson
was widely received in Germany, subtly but significantly shaping the
early stages of the existentialist movement. While the American pragma-
tists, and even neo-pragmatists such as Richard Rorty and Cornel West,
emphasize Emerson’s notions of democracy and cultural criticism, the
German reception appropriated him predominantly with regard to the
An Ethics of Exemplarity 33
close interconnection of moral antifoundationalism; exemplary lives; and
the aphoristic, nonsystematic style of writing. His essays served as an
important orientation for the development of an ethics that explicitly
rejects all attempts at a nondogmatic or noncircular justification of moral
norms by recourse to objective principles or human reason in general.
For scholars such as Herman Friedrich Grimm, Egon Friedell and, most
notably, Friedrich Nietzsche, Emerson’s existential philosophy makes it
impossible to appeal to an epistemologically reliable standard of right
and wrong. Rather, the philosopher’s sole authority, when it comes to
questions of ethics, is the example he or she may give. An example claims
our acknowledgement as an embodiment of a successful design of life, but
it can neither refer back to an objective measure nor claim to be exclu-
sive. In this sense, it transcends the dichotomy of is and ought: it opens
up new possibilities, new dispensations of being in the world, without
allowing them to be turned into universally valid maxims. In the wake of
Nietzsche and his contemporaries, it is especially Martin Heidegger who,
seemingly unaware of Emerson’s influence, elaborates on this notion of
exemplarity, paving the way for French existentialism. The article recon-
structs the reception history of Emerson in Germany, shedding light on
the philosophical parallels and interconnections between the pragmatist
and the existentialist traditions.
1. Emerson, Exemplarity, and Existential Pragmatism

Born and raised in 19th-century Greater Boston, Emerson is acutely
aware of the economic, religious, and political upheavals that Americans
are facing at that time. In the midst of the rapidly growing and increas-
ingly industrialized New England, traditional ways of experiencing both
the world and one’s own life as meaningful are disrupted, fostering a
fragmentation of religious orientations and denominations. At the same
time, the primacy of the economy extends to more and more areas of
public life, pressuring people to abandon subsistence farming and self-
employment as well as small family businesses in favor of jobs in the
more profitable large corporations. Keeping pace with the professional-
ized and specialized tasks to be performed in the manufacturing industry
and other sectors, however, comes at a price. In the wake of Adam Smith’s
The Wealth of Nations, the division of labor becomes the guiding prin-
ciple for the world in work, in order to increase efficiency of production.
Individual existence to an increasing extent is dependent on society for
obtaining essential goods yet is constantly threatened in its integrity and
its independent thought. Individuals are reduced to performing heterono-
mous tasks or assuming particular roles within the overarching process
of production and commerce, preventing them from expressing them-
selves in what they do. What is at stake in an industrialized civilization is
nothing less than the very possibility of integrity and authenticity.
34 Dennis Sölch
Emerson is among the first to explicitly analyze the existential threat
posed by the peculiar conditions of a capitalist American society. His
1837 address “The American Scholar” succinctly points to the difficulty
of transcending the physical and mental routines enjoined by the invisible
hand of the market.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The

planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom
cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his
bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond.
(Emerson, CW 1, p. 53)
The state of human existence is diagnosed as one of alienation, as an

estrangement from society and from oneself. Neither religion nor phi-
losophy, however, seems to be able to provide the necessary vision and
the methodological or linguistic resources to overcome this diffusion into
isolated functional roles by making human existence rationally intelli-
gible as part of a meaningful totality. Partly, this is due to their own
professionalization: instead of contributing to making human experience
intelligible, they are caught up in their own technical discourses and focus
on abstract means of interpreting experience rather than on experience
itself (Sölch & Wackers, 2018, pp. 38–39). What is more, however, is
that the very possibility of integrating the existential experience of being
in the world into a seamless coat of a totality of meaning seems to be
doomed to failure. No system can be said to adequately represent human
life as it is experienced in the midst of living in a philosophical system. In
a passage equally reminiscent of William James and Søren Kierkegaard,
Emerson’s 1844 essay “Experience” unfolds a scene of our existential
situation:
Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the

extremes, and believe that it has none. We wake and find ourselves
on a stair; there are stairs below us, which we seem to have ascended;
there are stairs above us, many a one, which go upward and out of
sight.
Whenever in our conscious moments we try to render account of our being-

in-the-world, there appears to be a past behind us that has led us to our
present situation and a future ahead of us awaiting our coming. Yet past
and future evade clear and distinct perception, offering no fnal destination
and no causal chain of events that could be traced backed to a necessary
frst cause. What seems to lie behind us is our past, whose ability to guide a
future course of action depends on the way we relate to it and interpret it.
An Ethics of Exemplarity 35
Since the future eludes our conceptional grasp, all decisions that we make
regarding our conduct of life are, to a certain degree, whimsical:
I shun father and mother and wife and brother, when my genius calls
me. I would write on the lintels of the door-post, Whim. I hope it is
somewhat better than whim at last, but we cannot spend the day in
explanation.
Authentic decisions do not easily lend themselves to straightforward

explanations and justifcations. The actions and decisions most true to
ourselves do not depend on public reasons, and they are not backed by
a secure ontological or epistemological foundation. All that can be said
about their motivation is that they are nonconformist: i.e., they do not
take for granted what may count as a valid argument in the frst place.
However, the whimsicality of our conduct, for Emerson, does not amount
to mere decisionism. Relying on our sincere moods allows for something
to make itself felt that is not subject to our conscious will but is intuited
as good and true, a transcendent power that Emerson refers to as over-
soul and that resurfaces in various forms in existentialist thought: e.g., as
Being in Heidegger or as Transcendence in Jaspers. It evades the domain
of public reason and defnition but may be justifed from the negative: the
alternative, for Emerson, would be to delegate one’s own responsibility
for one’s actions and to relieve oneself by referring to superior rules – a
relief that can only be obtained at the price of ignoring the fact that any
rule hinges on being recognized and accepted by the subject.
It is here that the existentialist and the pragmatist dimensions of Emer-
son’s thought are most obviously intertwined. The future does not result
from the past in a deterministic universe but opens up from the vantage
point of experiences in which what is given is transcended towards the
unknown. A choice whose value cannot be decided upon by recourse to
valid subject-invariant criteria must prove itself in the course of action.
It is the result, the consequence of our actions that matters, not apodic-
tic certainty before a decision is made. The philosopher thus becomes
an “experimenter” (Emerson, CW 2, p. 188), who takes the courage to
free himself from public opinion and who resists the futile urge to seek
certainty. It is not conformity to preconceived notions of relevance or
excellence that matter to him, but the freedom to carve out new roles
in accordance with his or her own authentic grasp of things. Insofar as
such experimental action opens up new modes of being in the world, the
philosophical life becomes representative of what each and every one
may achieve. Representative men, such as Plato, Montaigne, and Goethe,
are exemplars that do not simply stand for timeless ideas; their greatness
“is the fulfilment of a natural tendency in each men. . . . And no man
36 Dennis Sölch
is unrelated; therefore we admire eminent men, not for themselves, but
as representatives” (Emerson, CW 8, p. 301). Exemplars do not require
copies but transform other people’s lives by inspiring them and rekin-
dling their aspirations. They become “lenses through which we read our
own minds” (Emerson, CW 4, p. 4): i.e., they allow us a greater freedom
in making sense of reality and in providing models that we can adopt
or reject to give contour to our own designs. The concrete possibilities
made available by hitherto unprecedented actions may ex post be catego-
rized and become integrated into our intellectual and social repertoire.
Hence, principles, systems of thought, and institutions both enable orien-
tation and set limits to the unfolding of individual greatness. The task of
knocking standards and values off their absolute pedestal, of relativizing
their claim to validity in order to allow previously unthinkable alterna-
tives to mature to their full potential, is the recurring challenge of philo-
sophical thinking. The exemplary biographies of great men as diverse as
Shakespeare, Montaigne, and Humboldt cannot be reduced to a certain
number of actions and thoughts on a timeline. Defining their lives by
marking birth and death by two numbers on an infinite scale would be
tantamount to mistaking the abstract and retrospective for the concrete.
A life actively penetrates a future that is as yet unfathomed and plastic; it
carves out and makes available new ways of unfolding ourselves, creat-
ing meaning and possibilities for becoming – a task that John Dewey will
later delegate to society as whole.
In short, Emerson conceives of philosophy as the unceasing critical
reflection of given systems and conceptualizations that both allow and
restrict individual development. In rejecting the implicit or explicit nor-
mativity of the status quo, the individual cannot stricto sensu justify its
decisions by recourse to shared standards or premises; transcending the
boundaries of everyday rationality becomes an experiment that evades
the dichotomy of theory and practice: its realization is an active doing,
but in becoming a concrete reality, it is transformed into an exemplar or
model that contributes to our ability to give rational account of our situ-
ation and to contemplate our future options. Greatness, hence, is not an
end in itself and is not reduced to a few individuals: representative men
highlight the exemplary nature of all human action so that, in the last
analysis, “there are no common men” (Emerson, CW 4, p. 18).
2. The Reception of Emerson in Germany

Emerson’s writings quickly hit a nerve with a German audience that had
experienced the shattering of democratic hopes and prospects in 1848
and, in the face of an increasingly illiberal empire, eagerly absorbed the
new influx of thought from America. Beginning in the late 1850s and 60s,
Emerson’s collections of essays started to attract the attention of numer-
ous writers, literary scholars, cultural critics, and philosophers, and it did
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Title: A scrap of paper

The inner history of German diplomacy and her scheme of
world-wide conquest
Author: Emile Joseph Dillon
Release date: November 18, 2023 [eBook #72164]
Language: English
Original publication: London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914
Credits: Brian Coe and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images
generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SCRAP OF

PAPER ***
Transcriber’s Notes
Additional notes will be found near the end of this ebook.
This book did not have a Table of Contents. The one below
has been prepared by the Transcriber, using the actual Chapter
headings.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTORY v
CHAPTER I
THE CAREFULLY LAID SCHEME 1
CHAPTER II
THE MANY-TRACKED LINES OF GERMAN DIPLOMACY 15
CHAPTER III
THE PLAN AND ITS EXECUTION 27
CHAPTER IV
FORCING THE QUARREL 40
CHAPTER V
GERMANY’S PROGRAMME 69
CHAPTER VI
THE POSITION OF ITALY 78
CHAPTER VII
THE TWELFTH HOUR 98
CHAPTER VIII
THE EARTHQUAKE 127
CHAPTER IX
BRITISH NEUTRALITY AND BELLIGERENCY 141
CHAPTER X
THE INFAMOUS OFFER 154
CHAPTER XI
JUST FOR “A SCRAP OF PAPER” 177
APPENDIX
DIPLOMACY AND THE WAR 205
Photo: Elliott & Fry
Dr. E. J. DILLON
A SCRAP of PAPER
THE INNER HISTORY OF
GERMAN DIPLOMACY
AND HER SCHEME OF
WORLD-WIDE CONQUEST
By
Dr. E. J. DILLON
Third Edition.
HODDER AND STOUGHTON

LONDON NEW YORK TORONTO
MCMXIV
INTRODUCTORY
“Just for a word—neutrality, a word which in war-time had so often
been disregarded—just for a scrap of paper Great Britain was going
to make war.” Such was the significant comment of the German
Chancellor on Great Britain’s determination to uphold the neutrality
of Belgium. A scrap of paper! This phrase, applied to a binding
treaty, is destined to stick like a Nessus’ shirt to the memory of its
author, his imperial inspirer, and their country until such time as the
militarism which originated it has been consumed without residue. It
is a Satanic sneer hurled with fell purpose into a world of civilized
human beings. No such powerful dissolvent of organized society has
been devised since men first began to aggregate. The primal source
of the inner cohesive force which holds the elements of society
together is faith in the plighted word. Destroy that and you have
withdrawn the cement from the structure, which will forthwith crumble
away. But this prospect does not dismay the Prussian. He is ready to
face and adjust it to his needs. He would substitute for this inner
cohesion the outer pressure of militarism, which, like the hoops of a
barrel, press together the staves. Brutal force, in the form of jackboot
tyranny, then, is the amended formula of social life which is to be
forced upon Europe and the world. Such, in brief, is the new social
gospel of the Hohenzollerns, the last word of Teutonic culture.
This revolutionary doctrine, applied thus simply and
undisguisedly to what normal peoples deem the sacredness of
treaties, has awakened dormant British emotion to self-
consciousness and let loose a storm of indignation here. It startled
the quietism of the masses and their self-complacent leaders, whose
comforting practice was to refuse to think evil of the Germans,
however overwhelming the evidence. The windy folly of these
advocati diaboli, from whom the bulk of the British nation derived
their misconceptions of the German Empire, worked evils of which
we have as yet witnessed only the beginning. Those who, like
myself, know the country, its institutions, its language, literature,
social life, and national strivings, and who continually warned their
countrymen of what was coming, were put out of court as croaking
prophets of the evil which we ourselves were charged with stirring
up.
It is now clear to the dullest apprehension that the most dismal of
those forecasts, the most sinister of those predictions, were terribly
real, while the comforting assurances of the ever-ready publicists
and politicians, who knew Germany only from books of travel,
holiday excursions, or the after-dinner eloquence of members of
Anglo-German Leagues, were but dangerous mirages which lulled
the nation’s misgivings to slumber. And now the masses have been
ungently awakened. The simple declaration of a German statesman
of repute, and a man, too, of the highest honesty as this term is
understood in his own country, that the most solemn treaty, ratified
and relied upon as stronger than fortresses bristling with cannon, is
but a scrap of paper, unworthy the notice of an enterprising nation,
suddenly drew into the light of Western civilization the new and
subversive body of doctrine which the Teutons of Europe had for a
generation been conspiring to establish, and would have succeeded
in establishing were it not for a single hitch in the execution of their
programme. If the combined efforts of peace-loving France, Russia,
Great Britain, and Italy had moved the Tsar’s Government to stay its
hand and allow Servia to be mutilated, and the Bucharest Treaty to
be flung aside as a worthless scrap of paper, or if Austria had been
permitted to listen to M. Sazonoff’s request and reduce her demands
within the compass of the possible, the realization of the Teutonic
plot against non-German Europe would have been begun later on,
under much more favourable auspices, and probably worked out to a
successful issue. That plot belongs to a category of crimes against
the human race which can hardly be more effectively attacked than
by plainly stating its objects and the means relied upon to attain
them.
The objects of Prussia’s ambition—an ambition shared by every
anæmic, bespectacled clerk and able-bodied tram-conductor in the
Fatherland—are “cultural,” and the means of achieving them are
heavy guns, quick-firers, and millions of ruthless warriors. Real
German culture in all its manifestations—scientific, artistic,
philosophical, musical, commercial, and military—accepts and
champions the new principle and the fresh ideas which are to
regenerate the effete social organisms of to-day. According to the
theory underlying this grandiose national enterprise, the forces of
Christianity are spent. New ichor for the dry veins of decrepit Europe
is stored up in German philosophy and poetry. Mediæval art has
exhausted the traditional forms, but Teutonism is ready to furnish it
with new ones. Music is almost a creation of German genius.
Commerce was stagnating in the ruts of old-world use and wont until
German enterprise created new markets for it, and infused a new
spirit into its trading community. Applied science owes more to
German research and ingenuity than to the efforts of all the world
besides. And the race thus highly gifted is deserving of a field worthy
of its world-regenerating labours. At present it is cooped up in
Central Europe with an absurdly small coast-line. Its surplus
population has, for lack of colonies, to be dumped down on foreign
shores, where it is lost for ever to the Fatherland. For this degrading
position, which can no longer be tolerated, there is but one remedy:
expansion. But to be effectual it must be expansion combined with
Germanization. And the only means of accomplishing this end is for
Germany to hack her way through the decrepit ethnic masses that
obstruct her path and to impose her higher civilization on the natives.
Poland was the first vile body on which this experiment was tried,
and it has been found, and authoritatively announced, that the Slavs
are but ethnic manure, useful to fertilize the seed-fields of Teutonic
culture, but good for little else. The Latin races, too, are degenerates
who live on memories and thrive on tolerance. Beef-eating Britons
are the incarnation of base hypocrisy and crass self-indulgence, and
their Empire, like a hollow tree, still stands only because no storm
has yet assailed it. To set youthful, healthy, idealistic Germany in the
high places now occupied by those inert masses that once were
progressive nations is but to adjust obsolete conditions to the
pressing requirements of the present time—to execute the wise
decrees of a just God. And in order to bring this task to a satisfactory
issue, militarism must reign as the paramount power before culture
can ascend the throne. Militarism is a necessity, and unreasoning
obedience the condition of its success.
It is easy to think scorn of these arrogant pretensions and to turn
away from them to what may seem more urgent and more profitable
occupations. And hitherto this has been the attitude towards them of
the advanced wing of British progressists, who imitated the Germans
in this—that they judged of others’ motives by their own. But the
danger cannot be exorcized by contempt or indifference. The forces
at the command of the Teuton are stupendous. His army is a
numerous, homogeneous, and self-sacrificing nation. His weapons
are the most deadly that applied science could invent and the most
practised skill could fashion. And these weapons are handled not by
amateur or unwilling soldiers, but by fanatics as frenzied as the
Moslems, who behold paradise and its houris athwart the grey
smoke of the battlefield. For Teutonism is not merely a political
system, it is also a religious cult, and its symbol of faith is
Deutschland über Alles. Germany above everything, including
human and divine laws.
One of the dogmas of this cult resembles that of the invisible
Church, and lays it down that the members of this chosen race are
far more numerous in the present, as indeed they also were in the
past, than the untutored mind is apt to imagine. The greatest artists
of mediæval Italy, whom an ignorant world regards as Italian, nay
Christ himself, were Germans whose nationality has only just been
discovered. That the Dutch, the Swiss, the Belgians, the Swedes
and Norwegians, and the recalcitrant British are all sheep strayed
from the Teutonic flock, and destined to be brought back by the
collies of militarism, is a self-evident axiom. This process of recovery
had already begun and was making visible progress. Antwerp was
already practically Germanized, and Professor Delbrück, in his reply
to one of my articles on German expansion, described it as
practically a German port. The elections to the municipality in that
flourishing Belgian town were run by the German wealthy residents
there. The lace manufactories of Belgium were wholly in German
hands. So, too, was the trade in furs. A few years more of peaceful
interpenetration would have seen Holland and Belgium linked by a
postal and, perhaps, a Customs union with the German Empire.
In this new faith ethics play no part. The furtherance of the
German cause takes precedence of every law, divine and human. It
is the one rule of right living. Whatever is done for Germany or for
the German army abroad or at home, be it a misdemeanour or a
crime in the eyes of other peoples, is well done and meritorious. A
young midshipman, going home at night in a state of semi-
intoxication, slays a civilian because he imagines—and, as it turns
out, mistakenly imagines—that he has been slighted, and feels
bound in duty to vindicate the honour of the Kaiser’s navy. He is
applauded, not punished. Soldiers sabre laughing civilians in the
street for the honour of the Kaiser’s uniform, and in lieu of
chastisement they receive public approbation. Abroad, Germans of
position—German residents in Antwerp offered a recent example—
worm themselves into the confidence of the authorities, learn their
secrets, offer them “friendly” advice, and secretly communicate
everything of military importance which they discover to their
Government, which secretly subsidizes them, and betray the trusting
people whose hospitality and friendship they have so long enjoyed.
Their conduct is patriotic. The press deliberately concocts news,
spreads it throughout the world, systematically poisoning the wells of
truth, and then vilifies the base hypocrisy of the British, who
contradict it. That is part of the work of furthering the good cause of
civilization. Tampering with State documents and forging State
papers are recognized expedients which are wholly justified by the
German “necessity which knows no law.” We have had enlightening
examples of them since the war broke out. Prince Bismarck availed
himself of this cultural privilege when he altered the Kaiser’s
despatch in order to precipitate a collision with France. And the
verdict of the nation was “Well done, thou good and faithful servant,
who hast made such patriotic use of the maxim that the end, when it
is Germany’s cause, justifies the means and hallows the act.” Since
his day the practice has been reduced to a system.
With such principles illustrated by such examples, how could the
present Imperial Chancellor regard a mere parchment treaty that lay
across the road of his country’s army other than as a mere scrap of
paper?
That was a logical corollary of the root-principle of Pan-
Germanism. Germany’s necessity, of which her own Kaiser,
statesmen, diplomatists, and generals are the best judges, knows no
law. Every treaty, every obligation, every duty has to vanish before it:
the Treaty of Bucharest, establishing equilibrium in the Balkans, as
well as the Treaty of 1839, safeguarding the neutrality of Belgium.
Hence nobody conversant with the nature, growth, and spread of this
new militant race-worship was in the least surprised at the
Chancellor’s contempt for the scrap of paper and for the simple-
minded statesmen who proclaimed its binding force. I certainly was
not. Experience had familiarized me with these German doctrines
and practices; and although my experience was more constant and
striking than that of our public men who had spent most of their lives
in Great Britain, they, too, had had tokens enough of the new ethics
which Prussia had imported into her international policy to put them
on their guard against what was coming. But nobody is so blind as
he who will not see.
Pan-Germanism, then, is become a racial religion, and to
historical and other sciences has been confided the task of
demonstrating its truth. But if curiosity prompts us to inquire to what
race its military apostles, the Prussians, belong, and to interrogate
history and philology on the subject, we find that they are not
Germans at all. This fact appears to have escaped notice here. The
Prussians are members of a race which in the ethnic groups of
European Aryans occupy a place midway between the Slavs and the
Teutons. Their next-of-kin are the Lithuanians and the Letts. The
characteristic traits of the old Prussians, the surviving fragments of
whose language I was once obliged to study, are brutal arrogance
towards those under them, and cringing servility towards their
superiors. One has but to turn to the political history of the race to
gather abundant illustrations of these distinctive marks. To the
submissiveness of the masses is to be attributed the ease with which
the leaders of the nation drilled it into a vast fighting machine, whose
members often and suddenly changed sides without murmur or
criticism at the bidding of their chief. And it was with this redoubtable
weapon that the Hohenzollern dynasty, which itself is German, won
for the State over which it presided territory and renown. This done,
and done thoroughly, it was Prussia who experimented upon all
Germany in the way in which the Hohenzollerns had experimented
on Prussia; and being supported by the literary, artistic, and scientific
elements of the German people, succeeded thus far, and might have
ended by realizing their ambitious dream, had it not been for the
interposition of circumstance which misled them in their choice of
opportunity.
Thus latter-day Germany furnishes a remarkable instance of the
remoulding of a whole nation by a dynasty. For the people has, in
truth, in some essential respects been born anew. The centre of its
ethico-spiritual system has been shifted, and if it had a chance of
gaining the upper hand Europe would be confronted with the most
appalling danger that ever yet threatened. Morality, once cultivated
by Germans with religious fervour, has become the handmaid of
politics, truth is subservient to expediency, honour the menial of the
regiment. Between the present and the past yawns an abyss. The
country of Leibnitz, of Kant, of Herder, and of Goethe was marked off
by fundamental differences from the Germany of to-day. The nation’s
ideas have undergone since then an amazing transformation, which
is only now unfolding itself in some of its concrete manifestations to
the gaze of the easy-going politicians of this country. So, too, have
the ethical principles by which the means of pursuing the ideals were
formerly sifted and chosen. The place once occupied by a spiritual
force, by the conscience of the nation and the individual, is now
usurped by a tyrannical system devised by a military caste for a
countless army. And this system has been idealized and popularized
by visionaries and poets, professors, and even ministers of religion
whose spiritual nature has been warped from childhood. To-day
there is no counter-force in the land. Jesuitism, as the most virulent
Calvinists depict it at its worst, was a salutary influence when
compared with this monstrous product of savagery, attired in military
uniform and the wrappages of civilization, and enlisted in the service
of rank immorality.
What could afford our normally constituted people a clearer
insight into the warped moral sense of the Prussianized German
people than the remarkable appeal recently made by the “salt of the
Fatherland,” German theologians and clergymen, to “Evangelical
Christians abroad,” setting forth the true causes of the present
1
iniquitous war? These men of God preface their fervent appeal by
announcing to Evangelical Christians the lamentable fact that “a
systematic network of lies, controlling the international telegraph
service, is endeavouring in other lands to cast upon our people and
its Government the guilt for the outbreak of this war, and has dared
to dispute the inner right of us and our Emperor to invoke the
assistance of God.... Her ideal was peaceful work. She has
contributed a worthy share to the cultural wealth of the modern
world. She has not dreamed of depriving others of light and air. She
desired to thrust no one from his place. In friendly competition with
other peoples she has developed the gifts which God had given her.
Her industry brought her rich fruit. She won also a modest share in
the task of colonization in the primitive world, and was exerting
herself to offer her contribution to the remoulding of Eastern Asia.
She has left no one, who is willing to see the truth, in doubt as to her
peaceful disposition. Only under the compulsion to repel a wanton
attack has she now drawn the sword.”
These heralds of peace and Christian love appear to have been
so immersed in their heavenly mission that they have not had time to
peruse such unevangelical works as the writings of Treitschke,
Clausewitz, Maurenbrecher, Nietzsche, Delbrück, Rohrbach,
Schmoller, Bernhardi. And yet these are the evangelists of the
present generation of Germans. Whether the innocence of the dove
or the wisdom of the serpent is answerable for this failure of the
Evangelical Germans to face the facts is immaterial. The main point
is that first the German professors published their justification of this
revolting crime against humanity; then came the anathema hurled
against the allies by German authors, who pledged themselves
never again to translate into the language of God’s chosen people
the works of any French, English, or Russian man of letters; these
were succeeded by the Socialists, who readily discovered chapter
and verse in the Gospel of Marx for the catastrophic action of the
Government they were wont to curse, and exhorted their Italian
comrades to espouse the Kaiser’s cause against the allies; and now
the rear of this solemn procession of the nation’s teachers is brought
up by their spiritual guides and pastors, who publicly proclaim that
their Divine Master may fully be implored to help his German
worshippers to slay so many Russians, British, and French
Christians that they may bring this war to an end by dictating the
terms of peace, and firmly establishing the reign of militarism in
Europe. That is the only meaning of the summary condemnation of
those who have “dared to dispute the inner right of us and our
Emperor to invoke the assistance of God.”
If this be Evangelical Christianity as taught in latter-day
Germany, many Christians throughout the world, even among those
who have scant sympathy with Rome, will turn with a feeling of relief
to the decree of the new Pope enjoining prayers for the soldiers who
are heroically risking their lives in the field, but forbidding the faithful
to dictate to the Almighty the side to which he shall accord the final
victory.
As historians, this body of divines have one eye bandaged, and
read with the other only the trumped-up case for their own Kaiser
and countrymen. They write:
“As our Government was exerting itself to localize the justifiable
vengeance for an abominable royal murder, and to avoid the
outbreak of war between two neighbouring Great Powers, one of
them, whilst invoking the mediation of our Emperor, proceeded (in
spite of its pledged word) to threaten our frontiers, and compelled us
to protect our land from being ravaged by Asiatic barbarism. Then
our adversaries were joined also by those who by blood and history
and faith are our brothers, with whom we felt ourselves in the
common world-task more closely bound than with almost any nation.
Over against a world in arms we recognize clearly that we have to
defend our existence, our individuality, our culture, and our honour.”
From the theological standpoint, then, Germany is engaged in a
purely defensive war against nations guilty of breaking their pledged
word, and of wantonly attacking the peace-loving Teutons.
Nobody can read without a grim smile this misleading exposé
which ignores the Austrian ultimatum to Servia, with its forty-eight
hours’ term for an answer; the exasperating demands which were
drafted, not for the purpose of being accepted by the Belgrade
Government, but with the admitted object of provoking a refusal; the
fervent insistence with which the British Foreign Minister besought
the German Government to obtain an extension of the time from
their Austrian ally; the mockery of a pretence at mediation made by
the Kaiser and his Chancellor, and their refusal to fall in with Sir
Edward Grey’s proposal to summon a conference and secure full
satisfaction and effectual guarantees for Austria; and the German
ultimatum, presented to Russia and to France at the very moment
when the Vienna Government had “finally yielded” to Russia’s
2
demands and “had good hopes of a peaceful issue.” Those were
essential factors in the origins of the war. Yet of these data the
spiritual shepherds of the German people have nothing to say. They
pass them over in silence. For they are labouring to establish in the
minds of Evangelical Christians abroad their “inner right” to invoke
the assistance of God for the Kaiser, who patronizes Him. This
unctuous blending of Teutonic religion with the apology of systematic
inhumanity reminds one of an attempt to improve the abominable
smell of assafœtida with a sprinkling of eau-de-Cologne.
These comments are nowise intended as a reproach to the
theologians and pastors who have set their names to this appeal.
Personally, I venture to think that they have acted most
conscientiously in the matter, just as did von Treitschke, Bernhardi,
and their colleagues and their followers. The only point that I would
like to make clear is that they have a warped ethical sense—what
the schoolmen were wont to term “a false conscience.” And the
greater the scrupulosity with which they act in accordance with its
promptings, the more cheerfully and abominably do they sin against
the conscience of the human race.
The simplicity and unction with which these men come forward
to vindicate their “inner right” to pray God to help their Kaiser to
victory over pacific peoples, the calm matter-of-fact way in which
they accuse the Belgians of revolting barbarities—for that is one of

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Pragmatism and Social Philosophy

Exploring a Stream of Ideas from

Exploring the Philosophy of Death and Dying 1st Edition

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Handbook of the History of the Philosophy of Law and

Michael G. Festl is a professor of philosophy at the University of St. Gallen.

The Network Self

Deweyan Experimentalism and the Problem of Method in Political

Wilfrid Sellars and Twentieth-Century Philosophy

Challenging the New Atheism

John Dewey’s Ethical Theory

The Philosophy of Ralph Waldo Emmerson

Pragmatism and Social Philosophy

For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/

Edited by Michael G. Festl

ISBN: 978-0-367-48679-2 (hbk)

1 Pragmatism’s Social Philosophy: New Tiles and New Currents 1

2 Paul Carus and Pragmatism: A European Philosopher in

3 An Ethics of Exemplarity: Emerson in Germany and the

4 “To Make Us Think, in French, Things Which Were

5 Pragmatism and Sociology: The French Debate 71

6 From Pragmatic Maxim to Habit: A Theoretical and

8 American Pragmatism, Sociology of Knowledge, and

9 American Pragmatism and Frankfurt School Critical

10 Dewey, Ebbinghaus, and the Frankfurt School: A Controversy

11 Racism, Colonialism, and the Crisis of Democracy: The

12 Dynamics of Interaction: What Pragmatism Can Teach

13 Addams and Gilman: The Foundations of Pragmatism,

14 Recent Problems of the Public 237

15 The Affective Side of Political Identities: Pragmatism,

16 John Dewey’s Economics: A Liberal Critique of

List of Contributors 287

Pragmatism and the Birth

Paul Carus was born into an educated religious family in Ilsenburg am

One emphasis here is a further indication of Carus’s personal regard for

is desirable in a poet, but not in a philosopher; it is good in belles

which is sometimes called monism or a unitary world conception,

philosophy has always endeavored to trace the unity of our concep-

there is developing in the present age a deeply rooted confidence that

For Carus, these formulations can be characterized as the ideas of God.

He prefers to support “the superpersonal God of science whose cause

a philosopher must not be a one-sided intellectualist. He must bear in

There remain a number of loose ends here, although individuals grounded

If pragmatism is the quintessentially American tradition of philosophy,

become newspaper-men, playwrights, novelists. They are not mem-

1. Emerson, Exemplarity, and Existential Pragmatism

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The

The state of human existence is diagnosed as one of alienation, as an

Where do we find ourselves? In a series of which we do not know the

Whenever in our conscious moments we try to render account of our being-

Authentic decisions do not easily lend themselves to straightforward

2. The Reception of Emerson in Germany

Title: A scrap of paper

Author: Emile Joseph Dillon

Release date: November 18, 2023 [eBook #72164]

Original publication: London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1914

Credits: Brian Coe and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at

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