The Ethics of Energy: William James's Moral Philosophy in Focus (review)
- The Ethics of Energy: William James's Moral Philosophy in Focus
Although William James wrote little directly on ethics, commentators have increasingly recognized that a central current—perhaps even the main underlying orientation—of his philosophical work is ethical. The famous 1891 essay, "The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,"1 is thus only the tip of an iceberg. It is his only article explicitly dealing with moral philosophy; yet, arguably, ethical considerations are built into the fabric of his pragmatism, especially its leading idea that theories and worldviews ought to be examined in terms of their practical relevance in human life. In a diary entry in 1870 (quoted in the book under review, 49), James asked: "Shall I frankly throw the moral business overboard, as one unsuited to my innate aptitudes, or shall I follow it, and it alone, making everything else stuff for it?" Apparently he did the latter, or at least hoped to.
Sergio Franzese, an Italian James scholar, argues in his new book that even in the 1891 paper James does not offer any particular moral theory but critically examines the very project of theorizing about morality. James is a "philosophical anthropologist" instead of a moral philosopher narrowly conceived (51ff.). In addition to explicating James's relationship to philosophical anthropology and its historical background, including Darwinism, as well as its connections with his psychological investigations, Franzese offers a close reading of "The Moral Philosophy and the Moral Life" and other important texts, seeking to correct the widespread misunderstanding that James in that paper puts forward just another ethical theory. He argues, plausibly, that James's paper is "not the sketch of a system of moral philosophy, but … a critical analysis of the conditions of possibility of moral philosophy" (17), an inquiry into "the constitutive attitudes and activity of moral philosophers" (27).
Accordingly, James is not only a philosophical anthropologist but also engages in something we may, in Kantian terms, call metaphysics of morality. He seems to propose a subjectivist ethical theory, but he actually attacks any "totalizing ethical system," because such systems destroy individuals' "real possibilities" (26). No single ethical principle can ground moral life. It is along these lines that James finds moral philosophy possible "only as a critical science which takes each moral ideal as an hypothesis and each moral choice as an experiment" (40).
Occasionally, however, Franzese himself—or his version of James—turns totalizing, e.g., when telling us that "no attempt to unify moral [End Page 646] life into a single systematic totality has been or ever will be successful and it will never possibly be" (27). When the moral philosopher proposes a universalizing system, s/he according to Franzese illegitimately projects her/his privileged experience "over the experiential diversity of the whole human race" (28). However, ethical thinkers like Kant have attempted to demonstrate that the kind of systematic principles invoked in their theories are, precisely, legitimate—because required by reason itself, which is not a contingent individual feature but universal. I am not convinced that James offers adequate arguments against Kantian ethics, although I am convinced that his case against, say, utilitarianism is fully adequate.
Nevertheless, Franzese successfully goes beyond the mere acknowledgment that there are ethical insights in James's work. In addition to detailed observations about the relevant texts, he focuses on James's overall project: "everything must be thought and directed in the perspective of the moral question," which implicitly inspires and organizes all of James's work (50). Our actions tend "toward morally ordering the world"; hence, James's anthropology culminates in the insight that "the moral problem is the ultimate and fundamental problem of a being who needs to choose in order to exist" (103)—sounding somewhat like Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism. Even religion must be approached from this ethical perspective. James includes God in "the anthropological dimension," suggesting that this notion answers the human need for eternity and meaningfulness in life (210). Theism "encourages the idea that human action is ultimately purposeful," in contrast...
