25
James, Foucault and Nietzsche developed their respective philosophies as attempts
to delineate a picture of the self that is neither captured by the traditional narrative about the
place of human beings in the natural world as proposed by the Christian-Cartesian heritage,
nor by the scientific revolution and developed along positivistic lines in a significant portion
of our western modern and contemporary philosophical culture. The leitmotiv behind their
dialectics is the refusal of these traditional images of the self, and the demand for an alternative way of picturing the emergence of the moral subject from its activities of selfconstitution. Following Franzese, I will now present James’ place in such a narrative, concentrating on three intertwined aspects of his moral philosophy that are particularly relevant in
regards to the theme of the subject’s ethical formation: the anti-foundational character of moral
reflection, its exhortative tone and its underlying pragmatic anthropology.
2. James against moral theory
The volume by Franzese opens with a chapter, ‘William James’ Moral Philosophy in Focus,’ which
sets the tone for the whole book. The author undertakes a detailed analysis of James’ essay
The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life (MPML), by far the most quoted and yet the most misunderstood of James’ papers. The importance of this essay, lectured by James in 1891 as an
address to the Yale Philosophical Club, cannot be underestimated, since it does not only represent James’ clearest exposition of his ethical position, but also because it contains the
methodological instructions that are necessary for the understanding of James’ moral ideas as
they are explored in his other writings.
26
Therefore, it is not a case that its deep misunderstandings brought a paltry reception of the whole James’ moral philosophy.
The misunderstanding consists in a misreading of the tone and aims of the essay altogether: with a few exceptions
27 MPML has been understood as a defense of utilitarianism,
25 Richard J. Bernstein, Beyond Objectivism and Relativism: Science, Hermeneutics and Praxis (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983). Bernstein has dedicated a chapter of his most recent book to a reading
of James’ moral philosophy as an attempt to rescue from both these foundational anxieties and the thread of
relativism they mean to address. See Richard J. Bernstein, ‚The Ethical Consequences of James’s Pragmatic
Pluralism,‛ in The Pragmatic Turn (Polity Press: London, 2010).
26 There is an interesting question about the connection between James’ methodological considerations on
the nature of morality and the moral instructions pervading his work on psychology and pragmatism, a
question not explicitly addressed in these terms by Franzese. An interesting treatment of this aspect is given
by Bernard P. Brennan in the last two chapter of his The Ethics of William James (New York: Vintage Books,
1961).
27 Most notably, Hilary and Ruth Anna Putnam, who both in their joint papers and in their individual works
on James have developed a compelling reading of such an essay. See in particular, Hilary Putnam and Ruth
Anna Putnam, ‚William James’ Ideas,‛ in Hilary Putnam, Realism with a Human Face (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1990), where a foundational reading of James’ moral philosophy is dismissed as inappropriate: ‘James (as well as Dewey) takes the same approach to ethics as he does to common sense and
science. Here too, he thinks, there are procedures which can be imperfectly characterized and which might
be improved in the course of ethical inquiry itself. What is not available is a set of final ethical truths or a
method by which they can be discovered. He tries to change our philosophical sensibility, rather than to replace
one foundationalist ethical project with another, on the one hand, or to convince us that ethics is "noncognitive," on the other’ (223, our italics). See also Hilary Putnam, ‚Philosophy as Reconstructive Activity:
William James on Moral Philosophy,‛ in The Pragmatic Turn in Philosophy. Contemporary Engagements between Marchetti: review essay of The Ethics of Energy
137
due to the presence of some passages that, if read out of context, could sound as a defense of a
nuanced version of the principle of maximization of goods. However, an attentive analysis of
the dialectic in which those passages are embedded will reveal the real stakes of this capital
essay, in particular its anti-foundational and anti-theoretical inspiration. As Franzese puts it
in the very first page of his book
the essay of 1891 does not work as an outline of a moral theory because it was certainly not
intended to be one. On the contrary, it was intended to show the futility of that traditional
philosophical task, which is perhaps why philosophers have intended not to read it too
closely<*t+he ‘The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life’ is a critical analysis of the validity
of any moral theory, in the terms of its relation to the moral philosopher, rather than
presenting another specific moral theory.
____Elena: It’s interesting for me that these authors think it necessary to choose between “one foundationalist ethical project with another” or none at all which is simply another one. I suppose I have, wanting or not, adhered to a foundationalist ethical project in my conviction that what we do is “pro-life” and “life-giving” or “against-life” and “life-hurting”.
In other words, crime is certainly a reality for me and when we fall into crime we turn against life. To what extent the things we do are legally criminal is the real question here because I have certainly spent many years of my life doing things that were more damaging than constructive. The whole “cult” period was both on different spheres: extremely rich and positive in launching me into the understanding of other dimensions and extremely negative in giving up the right to socially participate and decide on things that concerned me. I guess my definition of crime would be everything that acts against the self, weakening the ability of every individual to ACT in life, privately and publicly and legally criminal and punishable, every action that acts against one’s self or that of others.
Who could then JUDGE that one is acting against one’s self or others?
Who but consciousness? And how could we ever establish such consciousness without it becoming an authoritarian criminal? For example, I personally believe that people should develop scientific, artistic and social skills and that it acts against people’s self to be trained to develop in mostly one area. For me that “conditioning” of people’s lives is “criminal”: it acts against “life” and “life-giving-forces”, hence, against those individual’s selves. Today we would not put anyone in jail for doing that or we’d all have to go to jail for practicing it but tomorrow it’ll be seen as an aspect of our ignorance, that is, our unconsciousness.________________
28
The author engages in a patient analysis of the interpretations given to the essay, and in particular he concentrates on Perry’s 1935 monumental work The Thought and Character of William
James, in which Perry advances a very biased reading of James’ moral philosophy. Franzese
tackles Perry’s interpretation by challenging the textual evidences, taken both from James’
printed works and from his personal notes for the classes on moral philosophy he taught at
Harvard during the 1880s and 90s, which Perry quotes to vindicate James’ alleged utilitarianism. In particular, Perry reports a passage taken from the notes for a course on moral philosophy held by James in 1888-9,
29
in which he makes reference to Royce’s claim that in order
to choose which goods to promote in a situation in which some have to be sacrificed, we must
use moral insight, that is ‘consider every good as a real good, and keep as many as we can.’
30
The
major flaw in Perry’s account consists in reading James’ reference as an endorsement of
Royce’s principle for the solution to value conflicts, whereas in those notes James only presents some theoretical options that have been used in the history of philosophy to address
some central problems of morality. Even if the themes of these notes trace out the themes
discussed in MPML, there are important differences between the two texts, which Perry’s
melting pot fails to appreciate when he accounts for them. The most important feature that
differentiates MPML from the notes is precisely its intent to criticize the very possibility of a
theoretical account of morality by showing the limits of those moral principles that have been
advanced to address ethical questions. The difficulty James wants to spell out refers to the
ability of moral reflection to address the problems that characterize our moral lives, and what
is called for is precisely a new understanding of ethics as a field of discourse and reflection
that is able to inform our moral life in addressing its difficulties. According to this more
attentive reading, James’ quotation of Royce is supposed to show how the endorsement of his
principle of moral insight can help us in our moral lives when facing situations in which what
Analytic and Continental Philosophy, edited by William Egginton and Michael Sandbothe (Albany: State University of New York, 2004); and Ruth A. Putnam, ‚The Moral Life of a Pragmatist,‛ in Identity, Character and
Morality, edited by Amelie Rorty (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1990).
28 Sergio Franzese, The Ethics of Energy. William James’s Moral Philosophy in Focus, 3.
29 William James, ‚Notes for Philosophy 4: Ethics – Recent English Contributions to Theistic Ethics (1888-9),‛
in Manuscript Lectures (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988), 182-6.
30
Ibid., 185. Foucault Studies, No. 11, pp. 126-155.
138
is at stake is the decision between incompatible values, but it does not represent the moral
criterion for the resolution of them as such.
31
In fact in MPML, James claims that the invocation of moral insight has—at most—a negative function: namely, bewaring those conservative positions which invoke custom as the chief moral principle to settle disputes about
values.
Franzese claims that Perry’s unimaginative reading misses the roots of James’s discourse and makes MPML as unintelligible as incoherent, since according to it there seem to be
too many incompatible claims advanced at once—an error perpetuated by those commentators who took Perry’s words for granted. In order to understand how the claims advanced
in MPML are not incompatible, and contest in this way Perry’s reading, Franzese engages in
a painstaking examination of the essay. Once read in the light of James’ considerations about
habit and action, which the author examines in the second and third chapters—the essay
conveys a precise picture regarding the shape morality should take in order to entertain a
profitable relationship with the moral life it should address. According to this more attentive
reading, the many claims advanced in the essay about the nature of moral values and the
origin of our moral ideas, are to be taken not as conflicting moral principles, but rather as the
various aspects of our moral life that moral reflection should address, and the purpose of
James is precisely that of showing the difficulty for a narrow picture of ethics conceived as the
establishment of a hierarchy of moral values and principles to meet this goal.
______Elena: In the fourth way system, morality is dealt with in relation to the “being” of the individual resulting in a completely different morality for different levels of being which allowed the cult guru and its inner circle to justify his actions pretending that he was “freed” from standard morality. What was needed was an understanding of “morality for what?” If we accept the premise that moral is everything that acts in pro of life in each and all its expressions then it is easy to deduce that immoral is everything that act against it. It may be a simple good and bad formula but the extremes need to be tied to understand the balance of their forces, like the long rope one can have turning that finds a central point in which two spheres rotate.
“Pro-life?” Who’s life, what life? Can animals and plants be consumed by humans then? Surely but not to the point of destruction. We would need to understand the different dimensions in which our lives play out to be able to understand why a balance needs to be kept. If we think only humans have “rights” then we destroy the natural world and with it, our selves in our unconsciousness and ignorance. __________
As the author notices on page 16, no attention has been paid to the title of MPML, however, the headline is very instructive for understanding the subject-matter of the essay: namely, the relationship between the moral philosopher (that is moral reflection) and the moral life.
James claims that ethics is an inquiry into the nature of moral facts—which are much more
variegated than both classical empiricism and idealism are ready to admit—as they are
experienced by human beings in the course of their moral lives. This characterization eschews
any role for moral reflection conceived ‘in the old-fashioned absolute sense’, that is ‘dogmatically made up in advance.’ Moral reflection, for James, aims at understanding our moral experiences as they are displayed in ordinary practices. A piece of moral philosophy, thus, must
be suggestive rather than prescriptive: it must convey the depths and trivialities of our ordinary moral experiences, rather than prescribing which course of action should be appropriate
accordingly to some established moral principle. Franzese writes
*i+t is James’s insight that an ethics, or a moral theory, is to be suggestive more than imperative, hortatory more than prescriptive.
32
In order to spell out this instruction the author quotes a passage of capital importance made
by James in the introductory chapter of a textbook on philosophical psychology originated by
31 The author dedicates a detailed comparison between James and Royce on the nature of moral thought at
pages 19-22. For a broader presentation of their disagreement on the conception of pragmatism and its consequences for the characterization of truth that is relevant for ethics, see James Conant, ‚The James/Royce
Dispute and the Development of James’s ‚Solution,‛‛ in The Cambridge Companion to William James, edited by
Ruth A. Putnam (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
32 Franzese, 10.Marchetti: review essay of The Ethics of Energy
139
some addresses to Cambridge teachers, which dealt with the topic of the art of teaching and its
relevance to psychology. James writes
[T]he science of logic never made a man reason rightly and the science of ethics (if there be
such a thing) never made a man behave rightly. The most such science can do is to help us
to catch ourselves up and check ourselves, if we start to reason or to behave wrongly; and to
criticize ourselves more articulately after we have made mistakes.
______Elena: This is interesting because it is like saying that the intellectual center is not responsible for a man’s acts, nor is the emotional center and it is totally right. So much so, that when we “judge” a man’s act, we do not put in jail his head or his heart but the man. Nevertheless, the “science of logic and ethics” and there should be one if there is not, should guide people to an understanding of what is better and worse for their development.
This does not mean that what is better does not imply suffering or effort or that what is worse does not often give immediate satisfaction, it simply means that there are options that tend to strengthen or weaken the self._______
33
Franzese claims that these instructions set us on the right path to see the real purposes of
MPML. They in fact point to a central feature of James’ ethics: namely, the claim that it is
both impossible and pointless telling in advance which kind of experiences could be assessed
as morally relevant. For James, morality is unbounded since the recognition of a certain experience as moral or not will depend each time on its capacity to fulfill or frustrate our sensibility. If that is so, then a certain experience will be morally satisfying or lacking not for its
being in accordance with some alleged moral principle, but rather because it places ourselves
in a momentous relation with the world and ourselves or not. James writes that
[A]bstract rules indeed can help; but they help the less in proportion as our intuitions are
more piercing, and our vocation is the stronger for the moral life. For every real dilemma is
in literal strictness a unique situation; and the exact combination of ideals realized and
ideals disappointed which each decision creates is always a universe without a precedent,
and for which no adequate previous rule exist.
_______Elena: I couldn’t agree less with James: “morality is unbounded since the recognition of a certain experience as moral or not will depend each time on its capacity to fulfill or frustrate our sensibility”. On the contrary for me, the capacity to fulfill or frustrate our sensibility has nothing to do with the morality of the act. An individual that has been brought up into cruelty will acquire satisfaction in it without understanding the immorality of the act.
A second question worth addressing here is that what James calls moral reflection is in fact what I understand by religion: the dialogue of one’s self with one’s self or the exploration of one’s multiple dimensions.___________
34
Thus, the language of moral principles is misplaced due to the very phenomenology of our
moral life. This theme is explored at depth in the central sections of MPML, in which James
sketches the three main aspects of moral discourse—namely, the psychological, the metaphysical and casuistic question—and discuss the limits and point of a philosophical account of
these various aspects as they are experienced in our moral life. Franzese writes that those sections must be read remembering that James’ purpose in MPML
[i]s not to define a system or a hierarchy of moral values and principles intended to rule
individual or collective behavior, but rather to inquire into the constitutive attitudes and
activity of moral philosophers in order to outline a more adequate approach to the nature
and meaning of moral experience.
35
This is a point of the outmost importance, since in my opinion it represents the most promising aspect of the author’s interpretation of MPML. However, not all the expectations are
met, since while I think that here Franzese does a great job at debunking the foundational
readings of the essay, still I claim that the method he uses, however sound with his the overall
33 William James, Talks to Teachers on Psychology and to Students on Some of Life’s Ideals (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1983), 15.
34 William James, ‚The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life,‛ in The Will to Believe (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1979), 158.
35 Franzese, 27. Foucault Studies, No. 11, pp. 126-155.
140
project of the book, is not the proper one—that is, it is not completely faithful to James’ instructions. Our disagreement consists in a disagreement about the way in which the essay
brings us to see what goes wrong when we do moral philosophy by advancing moral theories.
Franzese reads the essay in completely negative terms, as the proof of the complete failure of
moral theorizing to account for the facts of our moral life, and claims that the consequences
James draws consists in the abandonment of philosophical reflection as the proper stage at
which assessing our moral lives. He takes the essay as demanding us to shift the focus of our
attention from philosophical accounts of morality to ‘historical and constitutive process of social
dynamics at work in the establishment of the moral order.’
36
In this direction, Franzese claims
that, for James
[m]oral philosophy is possible only as a critical science which takes each moral ideal as a
hypothesis and each moral choice as an experiment.
37
While I wholeheartedly agree with this perceptive statement, I suspect that this suggests an
alternative to philosophical reflection. I think that James’ intentions in the essay were precisely
those of presenting another conception of moral reflection, one capable of meeting the difficulties of the moral life it should address. I found the invitation to conceive moral choices as experiments very illuminating for the understanding of the relationship moral thought should
entertain with the moral life. Inventive experimentations require a work on ourselves that
consists, among other things, in the willingness to change one’s perspective, the commitment
to the tentative nature of our moral ideas, and the striving for the attainment of one’s own
ideals.
_________Elena: Yes, all that would be summarized in The System by Work on One’s self or what I understand by “religion”.
Franzese claims that this characterization has to be understood in the light of James’
debt to Lotze’s conception of ‘experimental ethics’ as he depicts it in his Ethik, in which what is
invoked is precisely an understanding of morality on the model of scientific (although not positivistic) inquiry. However, equating moral reflection to the mere registration of our personal
and social achievements seems to downplay the very dialectic of the essay, in which James bewares of picturing accepted values as the criterion for deciding hard cases of moral disagreement. Read in this way, the essay looses its most groundbreaking force, since according to
Franzese in it James would be merely substituting an a-priori understanding of moral criteria
with an a-posteriori one, while in my opinion in the essay he is interested in showing how
ethics deals with the way we understand and live with principles.
________Elena: The idea that ethics deals with the way we understand and live with principles is “great” because it allows us to realize that all people have an “ethical” way of life according to the principles they’ve adopted. These are all subjective until the individual connects to the “objective” within himself or consciousness. That’s interesting… because the idea of maya would be easier to understand here with a world of illusion as long as we are in the “life of conditionings” in an “imitative mechanical reaction” mode while free of maya when we act from our mature self._______
The experimentations James is
talking about are personal experimentation, in which what is at issue is precisely the understating that the subjects involved have of what they’re are doing as devoid of meaning or not.
There is trace in James’ essay of moral relativism and historicism as interesting moral positions, but Franzese is still held captive by the temptation of the foundational rhetoric James is
debunking if he thinks that James’ response to it is that of crediting a subjectivist variation of
moral relativism.
In this direction, I read the point and method of the essay not as that of showing the
shortcomings of, in turn, a psychological, a metaphysical, and a casuistic foundation of mora-
36
Ibid., 39.
37
Ibid., 40.Marchetti: review essay of The Ethics of Energy
141
lity—as Franzese does at page 28-40—but rather as the investigation of the peculiar shortcomings internal to these various aspects of our moral lives when addressed through intellectualistic requirements and their dissolution when freed from such a deceiving picture of what
morality should be. This shift has interesting consequences on the very understanding of the
central sections of MPML, too. According to an alternative reading I am advancing, these sections present the various aspects constituting our moral phenomenology and give an overview
of the difficulties peculiar to each aspect. The role of the moral philosopher is a descriptive
one, and consists in accounting at a reflective level how we fail to appreciate this variety if we
portray the point of our moral life as the establishment of moral principles independently
from our activities of endorsement and valuing the relevant moral experiences. According to
James, the gist of the moral life is the personal striving each human being employs in the
achievement of its own ideals, and thus the adoption of the right attitude that will lead to this
achievement.
_________Elena: Again, impossible to agree with! What is interesting is that this was probably one of the foundations for the “individualism” that has so powerfully developed in the past century. The achievement of one’s own ideals is that totally individualistic ideal and I believe we need to come to realize that the ideals, the possibilities can and in fact are the same for everyone: to develop one’s self as a human being: that is, to actualize “life” in the material dimension. “Life”, understood as the ultimate most vital impulse, not just the organic phenomenon of being born. If I were to take that sentence with a different approach I could definitely agree with the idea of striving to reach ones own ideals in as much as those ideals are The Ideal. The paradox is interesting because in as much as we move in the belief that we are “separate” from others it is our ego’s ideals what is being lived out while when we move in the consciousness of our self, it is our selve’s self what is lived out and therefore the individual’s ideals cannot act against anyone else’s. Yes, that is the paradox! We cannot understand it in the ego. ________
James discusses at length the notion of ideal in such essays as ‚Is Life Worth Living?,‛ ‚On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings‛ and ‚What Does it Make a Life Significant,‛ in which he applies the considerations already sketched in the concluding chapter of the
Principles titled ‚Necessary Truths and The Effects of Experience,‛ where he claims that our
moral ideals are more the fruit of new ways of thinking than of past experiences. In MPML
James insists on the dynamic character of moral ideals in the context of discussing the validity
of the empiricist principle of association in explaining the origin of our moral ideas and the
nature of value claims. Even if he praises Mill and Bain for their service to ethics in debunking
aprioristic accounts of moral relations, still he contends that the mere reference to past experiences and their association with pleasant or useful sensations is not enough to account for
the origin and normative force of our moral ideas. He writes in this direction that
*e+very now and then
thought or action may bear prosperous fruits. He may replace old ‚laws of nature‛ by better ones; he may, by breaking old moral rules in a certain place, bring in a total condition of
things more ideal than would have followed had the rules been kept< *t+he highest ethical
life—however few may be called to bear its burden—consists at all times in the breaking the
rules which have grown too narrow for the actual case.
_____Elena: The “ideal” is that we actualize our selves! That is become conscious of our selves or our selves self! This is not just playing with the words but language is hard at expressing the magic! We “actualize” our selves in our acts! ACTualize. The word should give us a glimpse of how in the act we express our becoming. The act is not our selves but the actualization of our selves and in the act our self is weakened or strengthened. What weakens it is immoral, what strengthens it is moral. We must understand this very clearly so as to realize that what makes an act moral or immoral is its effects on our selves. There is an objective reality to every act that transcends its effect on the individual realizing it. Everything we do has consequences and reflecting on our lives is reflecting on the consequences of our acts. A Bradley Manning can be a criminal in the context of certain values for the people in power of a nation but consciousness is never criminal even if it acts against the status quo. That is the freedom that Joan of Arc and thousands of others have reached. We are all destined to be heroes: kings of our lives: conscious of our selves working for the well being of each and everyone._____________
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